Re: [pygame] Network game programming with python

[Bob Ippolito <bob@threeoh.com>]

On Sunday, Apr 13, 2003, at 16:03 America/New_York, RPGnMets@aol.com 
wrote:

> "Well, if you're going to write a game, you're almost certainly going
> to do it in a mostly event-driven fashion "
>
> Why?  What is wrong with a mainloop that goes something like
>
> while (not over):
>    handle_input()
>    update_game_entities()
>    draw_frame()
wrt your pb comment, you almost definitely want to use pb, because it 
will make it much easier to write a secure and stable gaming framework 
in the shortest amount of time.. a mostly C/C++ game won't be affected 
by the fact that your networking layer is in mostly python.

From what I've heard from Glyph (who attended the most recent GDC), 
every game developer using Twisted _has not_ found it to be a 
performance bottleneck in their games, even though the majority of 
Twisted is pure python at the moment.  I've also seen benchmarks where 
psyco can considerably boost speed for Twisted, at least in the case of 
conch (the SSH client/server).  In fact, conch running w/ psyco hints 
has been shown to have BETTER performance than OpenSSH (which is all C)!

In regard to your mainloop, what's wrong with registering those events 
with the reactor?  That's the Twisted way of doing things.  Here's an 
oversimplified example:

FRAMEDELAY = 1.0 / 30.0
def oneFrame():
	handle_input()
	update_game_entities()
	draw_frame()
	if not over:
		# call oneFrame after a short delay
		reactor.callLater(FRAMEDELAY, oneFrame)

if __name__ == '__main__':
	from twisted.internet import reactor
	gameSetup()
	# call oneFrame at the next reactor iteration
	reactor.callLater(0.0, oneFrame)
	reactor.run()
	gameShutdown()