Re: [pygame] this week in dobb's python-url

["Pete Shinners" <pete@visionart.com>]

> In article <004b01c0ed0d$6e243bc0$0200a8c0@petebox> you wrote:
> > anyone have their pyquake running just yet? sure wouldn't want to
> > disappoint the python community ;]
> 
> At the moment I'm a bit too busy rewriting Deus Ex in TECO, but I'll
> add it to my projects list ;-)
> 
> Do things like a 3d engine work well in SDL? From what we've got in
> pygame, it seems to me to be a lot easier to blit previously existing
> images to the screen than to draw lines and things like that -- am I
> wrong?

well, pygame-1.1 is coming, and it has full opengl support through
pyopengl. still, when you get to the quake level you really begin
taxing the machine. i'm sure a python engine versus a C engine would
show a strong difference in speed.

still, running the game logic in some form of higher level language
is slowly becoming the norm with games these days. the quake3 engine
runs all game logic in its own precompiled bytecode language. same for
unreal based games with unrealscript. neither of these languages has
reached as high a level as python yet, but keep watching. i imagine
within a generation or two of game engines, the C code will be 
limited to the very core routines (same percentage as assembly was
being used in the pre 3d accelerator days)

i hear the crystalspace 3d engine has full python hooks, but i
haven't looked into that at all yet. a different project has taken
the quakeworld (old quake1) server and replaced all the old
"quake-c" with python code. even the recent blade of darkness
game ran all python code for the logic. i haven't looked into the
games, but if you download some of the mods for the game, it is
only python code. i think that's pretty cool.

at this point i think arcade-style 3d games should be fully possible
in python. getting more advanced you'll need to add more C code to
handle things like collision testing, visibility checks, and whatnot.
still, with a small library of nice helper functions in C, the rest of
the game should be happy under python. just need to actually test it all someday :]



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