🎉 RenLocalizer v2.8.0 — What's New?
Pre-release
🎨 UI Revision — A Visual Cleanup
This isn't a ground-up rebuild — think of it as a long-overdue visual cleanup that makes the existing interface easier to navigate and less cluttered. The left navigation has been expanded from icon-only shortcuts into a labeled sidebar so finding your way around no longer requires memorizing icons. Settings got split into tabbed sections (General, Engines, Translation, Network, AI, System) so you're not scrolling through one giant wall of options anymore.
The Home screen now has a compact status strip showing your current project, language pair, engine, and TM state at a glance. The log panel is now collapsible to reduce clutter when you don't need it. Glossary, Cache, and Tools pages were reworked into cleaner dashboard-style layouts with summary cards and grouped sections.
A handful of polish details that add up: cards now size themselves based on content so nothing overlaps, rows are less cramped, headers separate icons from text for better cross-platform rendering, and the V2 label has been quietly dropped from the UI.
⚡ Startup Experience
A proper animated splash screen now shows during startup so the app no longer looks frozen on slower machines. It shows stage-based loading messages with a subtle animation — a small thing that makes a noticeable difference on first launch.
🐛 Stability Fixes
A NavigationBar load failure that caused the sidebar not to appear on startup is now resolved. Path and URL handling across dialogs, file operations, and TM flows has been standardized so platform-specific quirks on Windows, Linux, and macOS are less likely.
🔍 Translation Coverage
Quoted speaker name formats like "Mark" "..." and image-attribute say lines are now correctly extracted, closing a gap for games that use non-standard character name syntax.
🛠️ New Tool: TXT/YAML Translator
A new standalone helper for translating .txt and .yml/.yaml files outside of Ren'Py projects. It scans folders recursively, creates automatic backups, and replaces files in place. Marked as experimental for now.
Bottom line: v2.8.0 is a visual polish pass that makes RenLocalizer feel tidier and more organized — cleaner navigation, smarter layouts, and a startup that no longer looks frozen. All advanced options stay fully accessible; they're just easier to find now.
⚠️ Beta Notice: Due to the scope of the UI changes in this release, v2.8.0 will be marked as beta for the first few days. If you run into any unexpected issues, please report them in the thread so they can be addressed quickly before the stable release.