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Environment Variables

The following environment variables control the behavior of Ren'Py:

RENPY_SCALE_FACTOR

If set, this is parsed as a floating point number, and the display screen is scaled by that amount. For example, if RENPY_SCALE_FACTOR is set to "0.5", everything is half normal size.

RENPY_SCALE_FAST

If set and Ren'Py starts scaling the display screen, the display screen will use nearest-neighbor filtering rather than slower but higher-quality bilinear filtering. It should generally be unnecessary to set this.

RENPY_DISABLE_JOYSTICK

If set, joystick detection is disabled. Use this if a faulty joystick is causing Ren'Py to advance when not desired.

RENPY_DISABLE_FULLSCREEN

If set, Ren'Py will refuse to go into fullscreen mode.

RENPY_DISABLE_SOUND

This prevents sound playback from occuring. If this variable contains "pss", sound playback will be disabled. If it contains "mixer", volume control will be disabled. A value of "pss,mixer" will disable both.

RENPY_SOUND_BUFSIZE

This controls the sound buffer size. Values larger than the default (2048) can prevent sound from skipping, at the cost of a larger delay from when a sound is invoked to when it is played.

RENPY_NOMIXER

If set, prevents Ren'Py from trying to control the system audio mixer.

RENPY_EDITOR

The default value of config.editor.

RENPY_EDITOR_FILE_SEPARATOR

The default value of config.editor_file_separator.

RENPY_EDITOR_TRANSIENT

The default value of config.editor_transient.

RENPY_SCREENSHOT_PATTERN

A pattern used to create screenshot filenames. It should contain a single %d substitution in it. For example, setting this to "screenshot%04d.jpg" will cause Ren'Py to write out jpeg screenshots rather than the usual pngs.

RENPY_LESS_MEMORY

This causes Ren'Py to reduce its memory usage, in exchange for reductions in speed.

RENPY_LESS_UPDATES

This causes Ren'Py to reduce the number of screen updates that occur.

RENPY_LESS_MOUSE

This causes Ren'Py to disable the mouse at all times.

RENPY_BASE

This environment variable is exported by Ren'Py to processes run by it. It contains the full path to the directory containing renpy.exe, renpy.sh, or renpy.app.

As Ren'Py uses SDL, its behavior can also be controlled by the SDL environment variables.

At startup, Ren'Py will look in the Ren'Py directory (the one containing renpy.exe or renpy.py) for the file "environment.txt". If it exists, it will be evaluated as a python file, and the values defined in that file will be used as the default values of environment variables. (new in 6.9.0)