Re: [pygame] Hashido

["Pete Shinners" <shredwheat@mediaone.net>]

> New to pygame (since a week or two), i have been amazed by how simple it 
> is to create simple multimedia animation.
> My wife is teaching herself python and this is a great base to see
> something happening (no... print "Hello World!" did not really 
> excite her...) but pygame!!!!

hello guillaume. i'm glad it's helping. it's good to get input
from the newbies once in awhile. how have you and your wife found
the examples and tutorials? are there parts of pygame that were
very confusing or aren't quite clear yet? might be difficult if
you have a hard time with some of the english (not much i can do
about that though)



> So my plan Hashido, is to create a multimedia presentation authoring 
> system which would mimic the functionality of Scala.

you shouldn't have a problem with the presentation stuff. although
i'll warn you that there are no current GUI tools for working with
pygame. if there's a lot of buttons, sliders and GUI things needed
you are probably going to need to do them yourself.

i found the website for the scala authoring system (i think)
http://www.scala.com/infochannel/features.html

this looks like a pretty advanced app, and i'd be a little wary
of taking on a project like this. definitely a big time investment :]
then again, you may not be looking to implement all the features.
the current things i see that will be the most work are here,

video playback- currently pygame doesn't do video. SDL does support
MPEG playback with the SMPEG library, it is in the plans to someday
add support for this in pygame too. (shouldn't be too difficult)

fullscreen transitions- some transitions like wipes and fades will
not be hard. other fancy ones will require some solid skills in the
Numeric department. Of course it is also possible to create the
transitions in C or C++ and import them into your python code.

text layout- pygame text is simply rendering the text into a
new surface. this is a far cry from full the full a full text layout
system with things like bulleted lists, justifying, dropshadowed, etc.

GUI- again, it looks like this will need a lot of GUI for creating
each section of the multimedia. to do something on that scale you'll
probably need to write the whole GUI yourself.



> Oh! BTW, I tested yesterday and the drawing of japanese glyph
> through pygame works perfectly with the TTF japanese font.
> 
> So pygame would solve all my trouble!

woohoo. pygame supports full unicode text rendering in the font
module. i always assumed it should be able to do alternative font
sets, but its nice to hear it all worked.

 
> Is anybody interested in this?
> Nothing has started but I feel really excited about doing this so
> easily with python/pygame.
> 
> If anybody want to help designing, he is welcome I am a bad designer!

hehe, well i'd break it down to just the features you will want to
use from this other package. the good news is you already have a
program out there you are trying to duplicate, so it makes a great
start for defining how you want your program to work. (ie, some parts 
do exactly the same, and other parts changed around)


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