[pygame] Re: Coding Problem - Tcl Doesn't Work

[kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx]

I spent much of Saturday night and Sunday building a workaround for the
non-working Tkinter version. I pulled out spare Pygame code and built a
new interface (keyboard and mouse) that worked perfectly fine in about 24
hours, without my having to change the rest of the program.

I was going to say, Python is great; it's amazing that it's possible to do
such a thing so quickly. But then when I used Py2exe and got everything
ready to send out, I got a run-time error complaining about "sndarray,"
apparently Pygame's sound functions. My program doesn't use sound. This
error persisted even after I tried initializing individual Pygame modules
instead of Pygame.init() itself.

The problem on the judge's end turned out to be that he had the language
Ruby installed, which somehow jams any Python Tkinter program even though
a Python EXE is supposed to be a stand-alone program. He was eventually
able to run my program, which then didn't make the finals.

I'm surprised, though. Does this multiple failure, apparently through code
beyond my control, mean that Python is not reliable for people who want to
distribute EXEs instead of throwing their source code to the winds?

On a lighter note, for an example of an extreme interface replacement, see
<http://characters.www.media.mit.edu/groups/characters/swamped/description.html>,
an MIT Media Lab experiment in replacing keyboard and mouse with a plush
chicken.

Kris