[pygame] Just poking my head in..

[Bob Ippolito <bob@threeoh.com>]

I've been insanely busy as of late, but I just thought I'd pop in and 
talk about some of the things I've been doing with pygame lately..

I have pygame working great on OS X with python 2.3a0 and all the latest 
SDL goodies, but I'm hesitant to release anything because (a) I have no 
time, and (b) it's still alpha stuff..  I'll definitely release 
something as soon as python settles down on the mac.  Jack, Just, and 
others are working on making 2.3 *much* better on OS X, it's gone really 
far in the past couple months and will be a lot more mac-like.  I'm not 
sure what the release schedule is for 2.3, but that's when I'll be 
packaging up pygame and whatever friends are necessary for the mac.  At 
that time, the default python.org install will be compatible with 
whatever I release so I won't need to do any 'kitchen sink' stuff again.

I've done a bunch of stuff lately with pyOpenGL / pygame for win32/OSX 
(presumably it'd all work elsewhere too), and I've written some really 
nice classes for event management (kind of like Twisted's delayed 
mechanism).  I'll be contributing a bunch of it to the PCR sometime in 
the near future to that effect.. as soon as I finish up the project and 
extract the useful bits and make some non-proprietary examples.  Using 
OpenGL w/ pygame (or just pyopengl in general, really) is sorely 
undocumented, but over the past couple days I have done some node-based 
(sort of like VRML style) classes to handle objects, classes to manage 
display lists and textures, extensions to "ThreeDS" to work in pygame 
instead of Tk, mixed and matched opengl and pygame stuff by way of using 
a full-screen texture with alpha (leaving the viewport area(s) 
transparent and blitting the texture quad with glDepthFunc(GL_ALWAYS)).. 
I've even got mpegs playing in a texture from pygame.movie (by updating 
the subtexture every frame).  The framerates are ok, using display lists 
I've been getting 15+fps with about 300 nodes on the screen (some 12k 
polys, but I'm pretty sure the graphics card isn't the limiting factor 
here) on my win2k laptop (1ghz, geforce2go).. a bit less on my tibook 
667.

Here's a little screenshot of some early prototype stuff:
http://redivi.com/~bob/screenshots/pg_graphtest.png

-bob

Oh, and if any developers are looking for work in the manhattan area, 
I'm currently hiring ( www.mastersofbranding.com ).. so feel free to 
email over resumes ( bob@mastersofbranding.com preferably ).  I'm 
basically looking for talented people who can learn new stuff quickly 
but have some background in python, c/c++, sql (primarily postgresql and 
ms sql server), and (less importantly) macromedia flash.. because the 
projects we do are all over the map (in some cases, literally).

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