[pygame] Lepton particle engine 0.8a released

[Casey Duncan <casey@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm pleased to announce the 0.8 alpha release of Lepton, a high- 
performance, pluggable particle engine and API for Python. It is  
designed for creating graphical special effects for games or other  
visual applications. The engine is designed to be very flexible and  
does not rely on any other libraries directly. You can use it either  
with OpenGL (via pyglet, PyOpenGL, wxPython, etc), or with pygame by  
selecting the appropriate renderer. Examples are provided using pyglet  
and pygame. Although this is an alpha release, I think it is stable  
enough to use, and I encourage you to give it a try.

The project page is here:

http://code.google.com/p/py-lepton/

You can also get it via pypi here:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lepton/

This release contains no new major functionality, but it has some  
important bug fixes and performance optimizations. I thought I would  
release these enhancements now rather than delay them by unrelated  
feature work.

Changes in 0.8a include:

- Fixed accuracy of bounce controller so that particles are much less  
likely
  to escape from a container domain. (Thanks to dugres for reporting  
the bug)
- Fixed bug in Sphere.intersect() where it would return bogus vectors  
such
  as (nan,nan,nan) for stationary particles in some instances. This  
allowed
  an improvement to the bouncy example to further prevent errant  
particles.
- Collector controller ported to C
- Bounce controller ported to C
- Add 2D splode example to demonstrate how to use lepton with the  
default
  pyglet OpenGL projection.
- Allow basic attribute access for the C controllers from Python
  (More work is needed here for more complex attributes, like vectors)

If you have questions or comments or would like to contribute, you can  
join the google group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/py-lepton-users

Enjoy.

-Casey