The Screens VS Labels Poll

It has been a few days now since Beta 2.5 has went live, So hopefully most of you have taken the time to play it. You should have noticed a massive change in the way the game felt.

After a couple of requests to get the "Wait" button to properly refresh the screen, I only solution I was able to find was to switch from a Labels based system to a Screens based system.

What do these "Systems" Mean or Do?
The best way to think about it is Renpy has Layers, There are 3 Main Layers that you interact with, If you can, picture it like this. There are 4 Sheets of Transparent paper stacked on top of each other.
The Label Layer is where the Background Images and Sounds or Video files live.
Then there is the Character Layer which is used for the Avatar system.
Next is the Screens layer Which is where the imagebuttons, Book menu, map, and animation speed controller are.
And all the way at the front is the Say Layer or Dialogue box layer.

So when we used the Labels system it held the Background images, and when I used the refresh screen command for the "Wait" button it was only refreshing the Screens Layer. It had no way to refresh the labels layer, which is why the imagebuttons would change but to change the background you had to move away from the screen and move back to see it update.

So I am going to try to explain the pros and cons of each side, and you have already played both versions if you played Alpha 3.5 and Beta 2 or Beta 2.5.

Screens System Pros:
"Wait" button refreshes the screen. That's honestly about it.

Screens System Cons:
-Everything is on the screen layer.
This means that things like when you move around and the game does that rubber banding type of thing I mentioned before where it may show a couple of frames of an animation you viewed, thats because that animation is on a Label Layer, and when you switch screens it needs to jump back quickly to the last Label it was on to know where it was so it knows where to go next.

This also causes the issue with the teleporting to the Laundry Room people have noticed.
Because the Laundry Room is the Label directly below the Study. So whenever you combine skills it will teleport you to the Laundry Room, because code needs to go from top to bottom, left to right just like reading a book. You can force it to jump around using the jump command, or to reference code in other sections using the Call command. But in general it will always try to go top to bottom. The thing that keeps code in one area is the Label. When using the Screens system, the background is on the Screens layer so it can't stay on one screen, and will always bounce around like that.

Not being able to do things like Hide Menus:
The label layer also does a lot of neat things like runs commands, for example a button to hide the Say or Dialogue layer. That kind of thing can only be done on a Label layer. Simply having a button on the Screens layer that runs the code from Label layer such as a toggle to hide dialogue so you can focus more on an animation. The command to do that is literally just "toggle renpy.say" But it is not really possible to do from the screens layer.

And there are so many more examples.


Basically what it comes down to is Screens system means Wait button refreshes screen, but handicaps a bunch of other stuff.

So now that you have played both ways do you think that the Wait button refreshing the screen is all that important? I am going to let you all decide what we do for the next update in Terms of Labels vs Screens