Renpy 8.1

I routinely check the GitHub page for Renpy to see where they are. They have two crucial milestones: 8.1/7.6 Prerelease and 8.1/7.6 Release. Currently, the only thing in the "Release" milestone relates to Live2D. Now, I am familiar with Live2D and like some of the games that use them. However, not something I use. So unless there is something stops the game from functioning, I will likely start work with the pre-release. Good chance that it will be pre-released before I finish the bug testing for Eric Day 1. So included in that release will be updated images/movies.

Size

I did get a comment about file size (as long as it doesn't exceed 500MB). I have a few thoughts of game size:

[h2]Size of Game[/h2]
Fire of Life: New Day could get big if I am not careful. I remember back when played my first RenPy game, and going "Wow, that is a large file". Furthermore, I remember how disinterested I got because I had to update it with yet another big download. Thankfully, Steam only sends the changed/missing files, and Renpy has ways of organizing files. Part of why I put all the scripts in defines.rpa is that if there is a bug..it is a 1.6MB download vs. 200MB. Given the complex story, the size of the RPAs will get larger, but I want to make sure it is within reason.

[h2]Quality[/h2]
However, I am not going to randomly reduce a file size. I once went too far, and the renders looked..eh. Right now, WebP should be at 95% quality and the WebM should be at 22 Quality according to Handbrake (export as mov, and use Handbrake for final compression since Adobe doesn't have a native tool that works well in my opinion). The AV1 version split the video file size in half with the same quality. On average, I saw the AVIF achieving the look I want with a much smaller size then WebP was achieving for the same result.

[h2]Ability to Play[/h2]
It should not affect your ability to play the game at all. Renpy uses FFMPEG to play, which is always included in the renpy folder as part of the install. :) There are small things in 8.1 that will make me change a few things to ensure it plays, but...easily fixed.

[h2]7.6[/h2]
One of the primary reasons I use 8.0.3 is because of Python 3. Long story short: I am an IT person. So, I recognize certain issues with using a language no longer supported by the community (python 2.7). However, the drawback is that Renpy 8.0.3 only delivers 64-bit executables, which will not play on 32-bit Operating Systems.

So...

If someone wants me to make a version that able to be used by Windows 32-bit (Windows 7 to Windows 10 since 11 is 64-bit only), let me know. I will create a 7.6 version of the game. :)