Ren'Py Build

The purpose of the Ren'Py build system is to provide a single system that can build the binary components of Ren'Py and all its dependencies, in the same manner that is used to make official Ren'Py releases.

Requirements

This entire process will globally change your system. It will install packages from the FreeBSD latest branch repository and will directly copy over and modify those copies of major system files. Have a solid backup system in place before running this if you're uncomfortable.

Ren'Py Build requires a computer running FreeBSD 14.0+ (may support older releases for my fork but not sure yet due to not having the resources for fully testing them. While it can run on a desktop computer (I'm personally using an older laptop for writing and testing as we speak, portions of the build process must ran as root, and there are security implications to consider there. My personal recommendation is to dedicate a bit of time to understand how the system works, create a virtual machine (or on a backup system that's not your daily driver, and install the latest patched version of FreeBSD-14.0 (or equivalent minor version release) on it, and run from there.

Due to this primarily being used for building binary components for FreeBSD, the system requirements will vary based on how many different releases will be supported and when custom builds will be needed for specific games or engine requirements on the game developer's end of things. Setting up Ren'Py Build requires some FreeBSD/Linux knowledge to complete. In my personal opinion, it's not something most developers would need to directly use (the binaries will be provided for distribution for multiple Ren'py releases as new versions come out) but will remain open source and available.

I recommend dedicating a user to Ren'Py Build. In this example, I name the user rb, with a home directory of /home/rb. Once that's done, you will want to modify your computer so that user can use the sudo command without a password. It's important that the username you chose does not have a space in it.

That means first manually sudo-ing to root with the sudo -s command and your user's password. Run the visudo command, and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

rb ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD : ALL

Be sure to leave a blank line after it, then save the file with ctrl+X, and use exit to get back to the non-root user. Note that this will allow anyone who can log in as rb to become the superuser of this system.

Preparing

To get ready to build, log in as the rb user, and then run the following commands to instal git and clone renpy-build:

sudo pkg install -y git
git clone https://github.com/bedwardly-down/FreeBSD_renpy_build

Change into the renpy-build directory, install bash and run prepare.sh:

cd ~/renpy-build
sudo pkg install -y bash
bash prepare.sh

This will first install all the packages required to build Ren'Py, and then it will clone Ren'Py and pygame_sdl2. It will also create a python virtual environment with the tools in it. If this completes successfully, you are ready to build.

Third-Party Proprietary Downloads

At this time, there is only one third-party proprietary that would need to be downloaded and manually installed for the process to work. That would be the latest Live2D Cubism release (at the time of this writing is version Native5-R1. Grab it here https://www.live2d.com/en/download/cubism-sdk/ . There currently is no way to build without it but it doesn't natively work on FreeBSD. The header is the main required file.

You'll download it and place it in the tmp/tars folder (if it doesn't exist, create it) and that's all that's needed.

Building

You'll need to be in the renpy-build directory to build. If you're not, run:

cd ~/renpy-build

From the renpy-build directory, activate the virtualenv with the command:

source tmp/virtualenv.py3/bin/activate

It should then be possible to build using the command:

./build.py

The build command can take some options:

--python <version>

The python version to build. Can be "3" or "2", defaults to 3.

--platform <name>

The platform to build for. Only FreeBSD is targeted at this time, so this option is very optional.

--arch <name>

The architecture to build for. Due to FreeBSD dropping support for 32-bit, arm and several other architectures within the next few major releases, I will only be currently supporting just 64-bit builds, so this is another completely optional option. :

# Python 2

Platform("freebsd", "x86_64", "2")

# Python 3

Platform("freebsd", "x86_64", "3")

--experimental

This builds platforms marked as experimental.

A second build should be faster than the first, as it will only rebuild Ren'Py, pygame_sdl2, and other components that are likely to frequently change.

Updating

It's possible to change renpy or pygame_sdl2 to be symlinks to your own clones of those projects after the prepare step is complete. Updating renpy-build itself may require deleting the tmp/ directory and a complete rebuild, though simple changes may not require that. You may also need to run prepare.sh again.

Note

This port is not officially affiliated with or supported by the original Ren'py developer and will be receiving possibly heavy alterations from the original version (such as upgrading the build components to releases that FreeBSD recommends upstream, deprecating and replacing old patches, and altering the build system scripts themselves). If you use this software, expect frequent changes from time to time but it will remain mostly as stable as possible.