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Re: [pygame] Where to next?



On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Rene Dudfield wrote:
> Jasper Phillips wrote:
> >It would be cool to see pygame become more, perhaps with library extensions
> >for particular game genres.  For example I'm fond of turn based strategy
> >games, and think it would be cool if there were a strong underlying framework
> >for developing them.
> >
> >If nothing else, it would be cool to BS about!
>
> I appologise for the bad joke.  But reserve the right to make more ;)

I have no problems with jokes, so long as there's signal to go with the
noise. :-)

> Check out the stuff on the project page. There's heaps of interesting 
> things happening with pygame/python gaming.  There's also stuff not 
> listed there like pyode(the cool physics library), and soya3d the 3d engine.
> 
> There's pygsear, a very interesting frame work appearing.  There's also 
> a bunch of other frame works appearing around the place, and some which 
> have been around for a while(pyplatform, pyzzle).  Things like the 
> strikeops which quite a bit of interesting code was made for.  There's 
> also lots of individuals developing code seperately for use in games.  
> There's also the pcr.

I have, and it all seemed rather haphazard, with nothing really grabbing
my attention.  Most of it is very specific, and the only things similar to
what I had in mind are PyGsear, Pyui, PyPlatform and Pyzzle.

These are close, but it would be cool to combine them into a generic
framework.  This way everyone could relly upon the same proven code for
ubiquitous things like save/load interfaces, integration into Twisted for
networking, widget/gui extensions to things like wxPython, etc.

As this became more stable, more specific genre framework extensions could be
worked in, like PyPlatform and Pyzzle, but still relying upon the general
framework for ubiquitous things.

In short I'd like to see a commercial quality open source game framework.
However, perhaps I'm biased as I'm not using pygame purely for fun.


> I like the way that libraries are developing seperately at the moment.  
> That is each developing seperately in their own style.  Maybe some of 
> that stuff could be shared in the core pygame library though.  Perhaps 
> things which are modular could be put in a pygame-utilities or something.

A random selection of libraries/frameworks with little way to tell their
quality without actually using them does not particularily interest me.
However Standardized versions of their repeated/modular bits in common
interests me quite a bit!

> Here's a small list of some code which could be moved into pygame or a 
> seperate pygame-utils type library:
> 
>   paths.py in the strikeops repository.  It's for moving creatures along 
> paths at set speeds.
>   bezier.py (there was one posted to the list a while ago).
>   An animation class like the one in strikeops or in suckabots.  So it's 
> easy for people to make animations.
>   A zipfile like access for images and sounds(there's a few instances of 
> this code lying around).
>   Special effects/transition library(heaps of cool stuff for this in the 
> pcr!)
>   Path finding code(there are some python A* implementations around, and 
> some interesting code in strikeops).

Yes.  This is the sort of thing I'd like to see.

> All the code would have to be cleaned up and tested/documented, but it 
> wouldn't be too hard to make a library of all this stuff.

I'm far more interested in seeing a framework than a library (e.g. TWisted),
but the seeds for something very cool are definitely there.

However, IMHO you are underestimating the difficulty of doing this in
people's spare time.  Still, the benefits to doing so are great, especially
if you can entice smaller development studios to use it commercially, and
contribute back additions.  More and more game companies are starting to use
Python, and a timely move could see Pygame grow wildly.

-Jasper


PS My perspective is that of a self employed game developer, working on
a turn based strategy game.  At some point I want to open source parts of
my framework, and it would be cool if there was a good place to contribute
them.