Good news for Linux users re Ren'Py games!

Community General
1

Are you a Linux user, who found a potentially interesting Ren’Py game that’s (sigh) Windoze-only?
Simple trick to try:

  1. Find another Ren’Py game that uses the same version of Python (many use the older 2.7). The example I tried was Python 3.9, so I used MurMur 6.1 from this site as the “donor”.
  2. copy the entire %gamefullname%/lib/py3-linux-x86_64 directory to %newgame%/lib.
  3. rename the %gameshortname% file inside that directory (in this case, murmur) to %newgameshortname% (no extension!)
  4. make sure that this file has execution permission set
  5. copy the %gameshortname%.sh file from the %gamefullname% base directory to new game’s base directory.
  6. rename the copied *.sh to %newgameshortname%.sh
  7. make sure that our new *.sh has execute permission set
  8. double click the *.sh file (in most desktops) to play. YMMV. Any disappointment after that is your own.
    HOPEFULLY the dev will see this and start including the files in the download!
2

I didn’t try it, but another idea would be to try renpy2linux,
though it’s so old it will certainly require some modifications, like:

python -c 'from renpy import version_tuple; print ".".join(str(i) for i in version_tuple[:3])'

to:

python3 -c 'from renpy import version_tuple; print(".".join(str(i) for i in version_tuple[:3]))'
3

Thanks for sharing this, that’s actually a really neat workaround for Linux users. I’ve had to tinker with Ren’Py game folders before, but I didn’t realize you could just “borrow” the py3-linux-x86_64 directory from another game with the same Python version and make it work so cleanly. Hopefully more devs will start shipping proper Linux builds by default, but until then this is a super helpful tip to keep in mind.