Kinetic-Text-Tags

Text Tags that add various effects to Ren'py text!

Ever felt the text in your visual novel is looking a bit too static? Ever want to spice it up with a little flair? Or feeling a line needs a little more OOMPH!! to get the job done?

Then look no further! Through the power of Custom Text Tags, you can add any translation, rotation, projection, or styling you want on the fly!! You can even change the text and stack multiple effects together. You can even have your text react to the mouse a little if you'd like! Just add some Kinetic Text Tags to your Ren'py project and you'll be flinging text around the screen like a wizard in no time!

To use what I've made or to learn how to create your own, simply include kinetic_text_tags.rpy in your project and read over the code and comments for how you can get started and to learn how to create your own.

Note:

You will have to define any style information within the text tag itself as it is not automatically inherited.

How it works

This modification works by taking the letters within a string of text sent to the tag, and replacing them with custom displayables that is then inserted back into the Text with that string. Our displayable then handles the rendering and placement of the text and can move it around freely and even change its content and styling!

Additional Functionality

You can nest your text tags within each other as well. Allowing you to combine effects together. Though if you are nesting several at once, it is recommended you create what I am calling an Omega tag that will nest them together more directly and save on memory. It may also be more efficent for you to have one class that applies the effects of multiple classes in itself. I leave the decision up to you. Just do be aware of memory concerns.
The online documentation never mentions it, but renpy does support matrix math being applied to renders. An example of the RotateText class using this has been included in a block comment, along with notes of some other matrix functions within renpy if you'd like to play around with them.
Many more effects may be possible than the ones included. You could easily include ones such as text that zooms when first displayed, or text that seems to blow away in the wind after a certain amount of time. I implore users to experiment with this and see what effects they can come up with!

Base Limitations

Because our parent text doesn't consider us a text element, it will not automatically apply its text styling to our custom displayable. So any style choices will need to be supplied within our text tag. That way we can apply those changes to the child text (our single letter) by including the style rules within its string.
Following from the previous, currently, I only have implemented support for certain tags. The tags handled in the DispTextStyle class are {b}, {u}, {s}, {i}, {font}, {color}, {size}, {=custom_style}, {plain}, {outlinecolor} and {alpha} (though alpha is unused in renpy) as well as some of my custom tags. The {p}, {w}, {nw} and {fast} should be ignored by DispTextStyle entirely and allowed to pass through. As should the {clear}, {#} and {k}. The {space}, {vspace}, {image}, {a}, {horiz}, {vert}, and ruby tags ({art}, {rt}, {rb}, etc) are all likely to be workable, but how they should be implemented is likely to differ depending on how you want to use them.
Because of the first limitation, by default, if your text tag is applied to a textbutton, it will not update properly when hovered or selected. Instead it is advised to use an imagebutton instead. Examples of this are included in screens.rpy.
The history screen will not by default apply any text tags. This can be used to have what is shown on the say screen be different on the history screen if you'd like. However, if you'd like to have some of your effects carry through, then you can either append the gui.history_allow_tags variable or change the line $ what = renpy.filter_text_tags(h.what, allow=[gui.history_allow_tags, "your_tag_here"]) in the history screen section of screens.rpy
It should be noted that because we are using the Text class within Renpy, it may be a bit bloated. You could likely save a lot on resources by defining a Letter class that has much of the same functionality as the Text class, but only has to worry about a single letter. If you are finding yourself having performance concerns, I would advise doing this. I may also provide one here in the future for those interested. I'll update on here if/when it has been added.

Support

This code will always be free. But if you'd like to support me you can consider buying it off itch here. https://wattson.itch.io/kinetic-text-tags