[pygame] Mac Observations

[Kamilche <klachemin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Ippolito wrote:

> There is a pygame installer at http://pythonmac.org/packages/
>
> You will need PyObjC, and you may also want PIL, PyOpenGL, and
> Numeric.  PyOpenGL might need numarray, I don't recall.
>

I DID get it running, but boy, is it a pain to install on Macintosh 
machines! I needed the developer tools from Apple to compile from 
source, but my Mac had been updated to 10.4, and the 10.3 tools weren't 
compatible. I would have had to download over 800 megs to get the latest 
tools! I tried and failed, but it was soon a moot point because the Mac 
blue screened and wouldn't even boot. I decided then to reformat it.

So, I reinstalled 10.3 from the DVD, and didn't update it. I also 
installed the Apple developer tools, so I could install Python 2.4.2 
from source. But it failed - I had to do a 'framework install' to get it 
to run. Then, it ran, but typing 'python' in Terminal still brought up 
the old version. That's apparently a known issue in Mac Python. What was 
more serious, is I had no PythonIDE for the new version. The PythonIDE 
was still using the old Python 2.3 binary, instead.

So, I found a binary package installer for Mac OSX Python 2.4.1, which 
was faintly older than the 2.4.2 I was aiming for, but closer than 2.3. 
After installing that, there were weird bugs where I would go to click 
on an icon, and it would disappear out from under me. One folder, the 
'bin' folder, had every icon disappear! But I was able to run PythonIDE 
with a version of 2.4.1, so all was well despite the interface weirdness.

I really wanted to use Python 2.4.2 though, because I need to use the 
PYC files and don't want 'bad magic number' error to pop up. (Does that 
happen between major versions only, or minor versions as well?) So, I 
reinstalled 2.4.2 from source, and finally got what I wanted - a Python 
IDE that runs scripts with Python 2.4.2.

By comparison, all the supporting packages including Pygame were easy - 
I just installed them from the binaries, and they worked right off the bat.

Full screen mode does not work on Windows, so I did a workaround by 
recreating the background buffer when full screen mode is requested. 
This worked well, both on the Windows and Mac platform, so that was good.

The pictures on the Mac were very washed out looking. I knew there were 
differences between platforms - I'll just tell Mac users to adjust their 
gamma, because the pictures are going to be optimized for the Windows 
platform.

I have a concern about packages on Linux/Mac in general. I didn't know 
simple things like an OS version bump from 10.3 to 10.4 could cause 
tools to break. That's really unhandy for me AND users of the OS, in 
general. I want to market this game to Linux/Mac users, but not if it 
requires me to provide system and installation support on such a complex 
platform.

Does anyone have experience with cross platform games in Pygame? How 
much of a problem have you had with it?

--Kamilche