Re: [pygame] Is PyGame dying?

[René Dudfield <renesd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Olof Bjarnason <olof.bjarnason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

2010/1/27 Thomas Ibbotson <thomas.ibbotson@xxxxxxxxx>:

> 2010/1/27 Olof Bjarnason <olof.bjarnason@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> 2010/1/27 Jon <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>>
>>> Personally I think PyGame is a wonderful API for building any sort of
>>> complex animation that is secondary to pure 3D.
>>>
>>> For example, building beautiful animated menus, or sub-games, or simply
>>> handling I/O, it fits like a glove.
>>
>> Sure, me too, but do you agree there is a certain uncertainty
>> concerning PyGame's future?
> If you look on the www.pygame.org website you'll notice that
> pygame2.0.0-alpha3 was released recently.

Cool!

>>
>> Is someone working on Python3, for example?
>>
> Yes pygame2/pgreloaded has Python 3.1 support.

Nice, I admit I had missed this announcement on the web page.

The impression that PyGame was dying came into my mind because a new
friend of mine asked about writing Python 2d-games, and that he too
had the impression PyGame was not actively developed. Also, my
sndarray-question was left undiscussed for five days. It still is left
undiscussed. That might however be due to the maintainer of sndarray
being on vacation or something, I guess.

>
> Tom
>



--
http://olofb.wordpress.com

hi,

yeah, there has been a bit of a slowing down in pygame development recently compared to 6 months ago.  Not quite dead... more undead... in zombie mode.

The last pygame release was pretty draining for me personally... with 3 students and other new developers joining... and the most changes of any pygame release so far.  I'm sure it was also draining for other pygame contributors too.  The pace was probably too hectic, and after a big push it takes time to recover before putting in another big effort (or perhaps going back to smaller efforts).

The last couple of months have been difficult for me personally with moving countries, a death in my family, and a job change.  So in the past I've tended to help out a lot on the mailing list - and haven't been active so much recently.  However lots of other people also help out answering on the mailing list... I think most questions are being answered by people though.


Here is a run down of things that have been happening in pygame development terms(that I know of)...


Marcus has begun working on pgreloaded again, and made a release recently.  Hopefully some of these changes can be ported to pygame as well.

Lorenz has been working on his math branch (vectors and such) on and off.

jug & co have been working on their website.

Phil has updated his tinypy python implementation to tinypyC++.  So that it can compile a subset of python into C++ code that can run on the iphone.  This means you can prototype your iphone game with pygame and then use tinpyC++ (with type hints) into an iphone game.  You can also target windows mobile phones with not too much extra effort.

Pygame is now on other mobile devices, like moblin, nokia s60, pandora, and nokia maemo.

A new pygame book has been released for free!

10-20 games are released on pygame.org every week.

Other pygame related stuff I've been working on since 1.9.1 was released:
    - SDL 1.2.14 was released (which addressed a couple of hundred bugs)
    - numpy python3 port (I started on a port, and now there are a couple of people who have also begun on getting numpy ready for python 3).
    - a bunch of website updates
    - trying to get pygame updated in various distros - mainly through bug reports.
    - getting a pygame category on pypi (this took over 8 months from when I first started trying and years from when pypi first started up).
    - game distribution work (to make it easier for people to release their games on different platforms).
    - investigating techniques to speed up pygame development.
    - bug fixes/patches.

SDL 1.3 work continues... but maybe this is the year 1.3 will be 
finished?  In the mean time it's got a new nick name... 'SDL forever'.

There's lots of other stuff going on around python... libraries and such being released.  Probably too much stuff going on for anyone to keep up with.  A lot of the interesting things are made around pygame, rather than on pygame itself.  eg, http://pygame.org/tags/libraries 


Unlike commercial efforts, most don't get paid to work on pygame(except for the GSOC students once a year).  We also don't care if people use pygame or some other library(I've often suggested other libraries or languages to people where it's appropriate).  So we don't publicise what we do much, and sometimes we don't do much at all either!  On the plus side, people work on bits they find fun, no one gets charged for pygame and there are no ads.  People come and go, as they get interested in things and then move onto other things.  It's kind of a nice little community where people make things for fun to show their peers and friends.  Being able to distribute our games/apps easier and also seeing what is happening in the rest of the 'scene' should be easier too.  Also, it should be easier to see what is happening in pygame development... so pygame appears less dead.


Anyway... in short, development should start picking up again now... but hopefully not as frantically as before.  Somewhere inbetween sonic the hedge hog speed development and zombie pace would be nice.


cu,