Ren'Py Auto Speech Pauses

Overview

Have you ever struggled to figure out how to make the text appear more natural? Maybe with some pauses? But doing that manually is such a chore, no? I think so too.

But someone already has a solution?

KigyoDev came up with a good solution for that, which I'm very thankful of and made me want to use. However, it has shortcomings and choices which, I personally don't want to have.

This lead to that and that lead to this.

Now I have my own version of the same.

Key characteristics

• Works out-of-the-box with sane defaults.
• Pauses text using either relative text speed or absolute number of seconds.
• Integrates with your preferences screen using a single line of code, which is provided in the rpy's comments.
• Fully tunable by the developer.
• Works with multiple languages.
• Pause exceptions adjusted to different languages.
• Without (hopefully!) interfering with any other mods you may have installed.

What I changed/added

• Programmer can easily temporarily override user's settings.
• Pauses can also be specified in absolute seconds instead of only relative to user-configured text speed.
• Pauses are insensitive to text tags (however, tags can still affect exceptions)
• The screen included requires only 1 line of code to use.
• Deeper work done to avoid interfering with other plugins you may have installed.
• (technical:) Reworked the main algorithm to find where and how to inject pauses.

Installation

Minimal Installation

1. Download and copy speech_pauses.rpy to anywhere inside your game directory.
2. Done

Tune default values (optional)

1. Open speech_pauses.rpy.
2. Search for "Default values" in the file
3. There you find documented default variables for you to tune. The comments guide you how to edit those numbers.

Allow users to tune to their liking (optional)

Example (actual steps depend on how much you customized Ren'Py for your VN):

1. Open your VN's screens.rpy
2. Locate

   preferences

   screen.
3. Locate

   textbutton _("Transitions")

4. Under that and aligned with closest vbox, paste:

   use brunoais__speech_pause()

5. (optional) edit

   brunoais__speech_pause

   screen to your taste
6. Done

Terms of Use

You may:

• Do whatever you want with the code, as per MIT license.

Credits

Background image of the video taken from: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/839463

KigyoDev for being open and receptive of criticism. For helping me making file comments that are more easy to understand for beginners. And for the original version this version is based on.