I noticed that there's a memory leak with the current 0.3 version of the game. If one sits on certain screens for awhile (10+ minutes), then the RAM usage climbs at a moderate pace, and any save files made at that point end up being 100's of MB.
This is due to the 'dust' animation, which is calling and creating alot of local variables which aren't cleaned until GC runs, BUT also creating a ton of instanced classes that aren't GC'd until the current 'dust' animation is destroyed.
There are numbers of ways to fix. Is there a discord to post in?
that does sound like a serious issue. if there's a way to use a different dust particle effect, then I would love to get help to fix it.
I'm in the "Furry Visual Novels" Discord group where everyone can talks about VNs and give tutorials for others. since I'm part of that group, you could try contacting me through it as a fellow member.
I wasn't really aware that there's multple "Furry Visual Novels" discord servers.. I think the one I joined awhile back is now an "old" one, heh.
It turned out, shortly after posting the above, I realized the problem was alot easier to fix anyway.. Just to post here: In the dust effect file, simply replace every instance of "renpy.random.X" with just "random.X".
Basically, "renpy.random.X" participates in the rollback system, wheras a bare "random.X" does not. The intent with renpy.random is that random generated numbers can be replayed (get the same already generated numbers) in case players roll back or forward during the script. For effects like this, there's obviously no need for that. In the effect, there's an additional slight bug with the way the transform calculates the random numbers that causes the random numbers to be generated far more often than intended (the entire period where alpha is < .01 ), so each particle genreates alot of random numbers. Since renpy.random was being used, this meant that the rollback data stack was growing at a moderate pace while the effect was on screen (eating memory, and also being saved into every save file).
I figured that was the case, I only know of the one but could never see your post hehe.
alright, I removed all the "renpy." from the dust particle effect, and was able to open Sylving without problem! I hope it no longer stacks up when I eventually release chapter 4 (I'm in the middle of coding it still). thank you so much for bringing this up and helping me with this tip ^^