Ren'py Web Returns?!?!

Well, I guess this means I'm eating my words. Perhaps you recall my prediction that the issues with Ren'Py Web were unlikely to be fixed anytime soon?

Well, Ren'Py 7.5 launched a few days ago. And it seems most of the issues have been resolved. The browser based client can now run in Chromium based browsers just fine and is saving data between sessions. Not only that, but some other issues like improperly displayed save thumbnails seem to have been rectified as well. Performance is still wonky in Firefox, but that could be a Firefox issue - Firefox is known to be the slowest among current browsers by a fair margin. Anyway...

With this revelation, we've decided to reassess the possibility of a browser-based version of Sileo. We've already laid the vast majority of the groundwork necessary to facilitate this. In fact, Sileo itself couldn't be much more web-ready than it already is! The authentication gateway for our self-hosted Patreon builds isn't completely finished, but is close as I understand it and shouldn't take long to finish up. 

Now, this isn't a guarantee we'll be able to proceed with a web build. Things happen, as you surely know by this point! But so far, things are looking positive. We still have plenty of testing left to do. The build we're using for testing right now is derived from today's public build which ensures it's stable and well polished. That build however was produced under Ren'Py 7.4, so there is always the potential for issues with an engine version update like this, not to mention a new platform entirely. As I've said though, preliminary testing looks extremely positive so far! If everything goes well, once the authentication gateway is up and running, we can put this build online for all of you to tinker with. Assuming that goes well, we'll begin offering web as a platform for future releases. 

I've tried embedding a video of the current web build in action, but I don't know if Patreon will like it, so I've attached it as well just in case. Towards the end of our last run of development, we decided to move away from using a system to manually preload assets. The main reason we were doing this was because the placeholder images used before an image loaded in properly were god awful and looked horrific. Thankfully, we found a rather simple and elegant solution where we could create our own placeholders and inject them into the compiled builds, and the results were incredible! For a mere 10MB extra upfront, the placeholders now look pretty good! You'll notice in the video that a moment or two after an image appears for the first time, it becomes more detailed. That is the full detail version loading in. The version you were seeing before was the placeholder. If you've seen what Ren'Py Web placeholders usually look like, you'll know this is an outstanding improvement!

Anyway, fingers crossed all goes well with this! And don't worry, there's almost nothing left for me to do on this - the remaining work is up to Slouch in terms of the web authentication stuff and the team in terms of bug testing and approving the current web build. I will be hard at work getting the patreon build ready, as you'd hope! And if we're lucky, the two things might just coincide and you might have the opportunity to play this months patreon build in your browser? Time will tell!