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Too many files: publishing renpy VN to play in browser

A topic by hungry_britty created May 14, 2022 Views: 947 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Hello,

I've searched for similar topics, but I haven't found one with the same issue as mine.

Something seems to be terribly wrong with the way I build distributions in renpy, because I cannot get any project, regardless of its size, to be small enough to be played online.

I have made a visual novel with renpy and want to upload it to itch.io so it can be played in a browser. I've built the market distribution with renpy and even tried the direct upload within renpy. While I am able to upload the .zip folders without a problem, they can never be played in the browser. 


Error:

There was a problem loading your project:

Too many files in zip (1783 > 1000)

Please try deleting the ZIP file and uploading another one.


The VN isn't super short and it has many images, so I tried to reduce the files before building a new distribution. But the error I get stays almost the same.

So I tried something else: I built a distribution for the most basic renpy game. It has no images, two lines of dialogue, no audio and only one script file. I still get the error. 1851 > 1000 files. And when I unzip the folder, there are 1.666 files. 

The small difference aside, something seems to be wrong with my distributions in general. 


I've seen renpy games and VNs on here that can be played online, so there has to be a way to make the .zip folder small enough. Maybe it's just a stupid little mistake I made.


Could someone please help me? Is there anything I have to do before building distributions that reduces the number of files?


Thank you!

Moderator (1 edit)

Try bundling your assets into a .rpa archive. People usually do it for copy protection, but it could solve your problem as well. Though come to think of it, the resulting file might be too large, and bump against another limit.

Please consider only making a demo playable online, and offering the full game for download. That's the best approach.

Thanks for the fast reply! I already archived all my image, audio and rpy files, but the number of files barely changes.

Even my test project with no assets at all suddenly has more than 1.800 files... 

After extracting the .zip folder of my test project "Testing" (2 lines of dialogue, no images, no audio), I get these folders: game (93 files), lib (566 files), renpy (465 files) and Testing.app (538 files). This project hits the file limit even though it has no content.

(1 edit) (+4)

You're definitely building your distribution incorrectly.

From the Ren'Py launcher (latest version), select your project but don't click Build Distributions.  Instead, click Web (Beta), then Build Web Application.  This creates a directory with a bunch of stuff including a game.zip file.  Ignore everything else and upload the game.zip file.  Correction: you need to upload the entire directory, packaged as a zip file.

The Build Distributions button is for building downloadable games, not web games.

(+1)

Yes, that was the problem. This is my first time making a web game, so I didn’t know about the Web build. Thought it wouldn’t work since it‘s a beta version as well…

Anyway, problem solved! Thanks for the confirmation!

(+1)

Update: This might have been obvious, but I tried to upload a web build and finally it's not too big. It comes with its own problems, but at least I can get my VN to work online.

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