Another Attempt at Animation

I was planning on having this post up two days ago (and ideally with a different outcome), but things didn't exactly go to plan. If you've been following the development of Lab Rats 2 for a while you may remember some of my experiments with shader based animation, last seen here . Providing some basic animation to the characters of LR2 has been a little pet project of mine for a long time now, and two days ago I thought I would finally pick it up and set to work polishing up the concept.

Fast forward to today and I'm still running into some major road blocks. The crux of the problem lies in taking a Ren'py displayable and turning out a flattened, static image that the OpenGL shaders can work with. Up until an hour ago I thought this post was going to be a report of my total defeat, but a recent breakthrough has turned that defeat into a cautiously optimistic victory. I now have everything working except for patterened clothing, which made use of the AlphaBlend function, which has turned out to be the one displayable type that is stopping me from outputting to a pygame surface ( and then to a .png). If my luck holds I will be able to either get AlphaBlend working or move the functionality over to a different function.

If you happen to have experience with Ren'py and know an easy way to turn out a .png of an arbitrary displayable, I'd also be happy to hear it!