Re: [pygame] Pygame tutorial

[Shandy Brown <shandy@geeky.net>]

Well, since you've asked, here's some constructive criticism:

General: There seems to be a lot of "always do it this way" mentality. 
I don't think new users should be told that there's only one correct
way.

Section 1
P3 - "A game will consist of 6 main sections"
I would change to "This game..." or "A common method of organizing games
is..."

P10 - "Every game you make should take..."
maybe just omit that sentence

Section 2.1
An idea might be to follow the structure you laid out in section 1, even
though it is just a hello world program, just to get the user used to
it.

Section 2.2
"with white (250, 250, 250)"  - I'd call that very light grey.  White is
(255,255,255)

Section 3.1
I heard somewhere that #!/usr/bin/env python is preferred over
#!/usr/bin/python

Section 3.2
P1 - "You should put all your code of this nature first, in their own,
classless functions" - This seems to be more of the "only one way"
mentality.  Why shouldn't the user use classes?

P4 - "It then appends the image filename to the data directory" - sounds
a little weird. How about "This function assumes that all the images are
in a directory called data.  It takes the name of the file and creates
the full pathname, for example data/ball.png."

P4 - "Finally it returns the image object, and its rect()" - don't know
why you have the parentheses on rect().

Section 4.1
"def __init__(self, (xy), vector):" - whats the deal with the (xy)

Section 4.1.2
"With any game involving movement, you won't get very far unless you're
comfortable with trigonometry" - maybe change to "With any game
involving angular movement, ..."

Section 5.1
I think it would be clearer to a beginner to have
self.side = "left" or "right"
rather than
self.which = 0 or 1

"To make sense of how the ball moves" - think you meant bat.

Section 5.1.1
	player.moveup()
	player.state = "moveup"
This kinda breaks encapsulation.  I'd prefer to see self.state="moveup"
inside the moveup() function.
I'd also rather see the bat called "bat" instead of "player".

Section 6.2
"to stop the ball catching a ball that goes behind them" - "to stop the
bat catching a ball that goes behind it"

Section 6.3
It would be really nice to have all the code listed in this document. 
As well as providing a simple .py file to download.

- sjbrown

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 10:09, Tom Chance wrote:
> Can somebody check this through and verify that I haven't made any mistakes? 
> I'm by no means a Pygame expert, nor a Python expert, and I don't want to 
> make it "live" on my web site until I'm sure I'm not going to mislead anyone.
> 
> Many thanks,
> Tom
> 
-- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Shandy Brown                               Digital Thinkery |
| shandy@geeky.net             http://www.digitalthinkery.com |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

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