Re: [pygame] Where to next?

[Beni Cherniavsky <cben@techunix.technion.ac.il>]

Rene Dudfield wrote on 2003-07-18:

> Pete Shinners wrote:
>
> > Simon Wittber (Maptek) wrote:
> >
> >> It seems to me as if pygame is getting to be a rather stable and mature
> >> gaming library.
> >>
> >> So, where to next?
> >
> > break it of course! :]
> >
> >[good ideas snipped]
>
> Some random comments on various posts...
>
> I much like the idea of having a lower level library, and a higher
> level one on top.  I think pygames low levelness is quite good for
> people who want to do things a bit differently.  I also very much
> like how it's fairly modular.  eg you can swap the audio for
> something else, you can use different image loading libraries quite
> easily etc.  Another great thing I like about pygame is that most
> parts of it are very stable.  As in interfaces don't change much,
> and the code isn't buggy (Pete fixes stuff real quick!).
>
One of things I really liked when first seing Pygame was the
transparent Numeric integration (surfarray, sndarray).  With it I can
easily bridge pygame to other libraries, e.g. PIL, ogg/vorbis
(untested), openGL textures (I saw somewhere examples of openGL
textures created from Numeric arrays).  And the power of Numeric
itself, of course.  I think in an ideal world there wouldn't be a
single library that does everything, no matter how well designed.
There would be many libararies from which you can pick -- and they all
would talk to each other nicely.  This is already happening in the
Python world and I would like more of it.  Some points for bridging
pygame to other libraries:

- openGL: I see that good work is being done, I never used openGL so I
  can't say more...
- GUIs: many people asked about embedding pygame windows in
  wxWindows, Tk, etc.
- Networking: Twisted is probably great for games.  A high-level
  connection/play library would be nice, this was discussed during the
  StrikeOps effort.
- Event loops: both GUIs and networking have their event loops; any
  pygame program needs its own one and many games could use higher
  level event dispatching frameworks.  I wish there would be a
  standard event loop the whole world would use ;-).  Looks like
  Twisted already did the hard work of integrating its reactors with
  many other main loops - a standard pygame/Twisted intergration would
  be nice.  Anothing thing I looked at once was SimPy.  I wonder
  whether Twisted or SimPy would be convenient for managing events in
  games; if not useful out of the box, it would be nice to extend
  them.
- Input events description: every library has its own representation
  of input events, especailly keyboard events.  I wish somebody would
  write a generic keyboard abstraction that would work accross
  pygame/curses/Tk/wxWindows/etc.

There are surely other areas.

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben@tx.technion.ac.il>

If I don't hack on it, who will?  And if I don't GPL it, what am I?
And if it itches, why not now?  [With apologies to Hilel ;]