[pygame] multimedia pygame

[enrike <enrike@altern.org>]

hi all,

This email is to talk about some thoughts I had about pygame.
I have been involved in teaching multimedia/art/design students some 
programming and also how to develop projects. Usually in colleges the 
main tools used to teach these people is stuff like Macromedia Flash, 
Macromedia Director and maybe MAX/MSP and Pure Data.

These tools i mentioned have several problems. For example Flash has 
been very limited and not well structured in terms of programming. 
Director is more powerful but it can be quite confusing if you try to 
create a big program. Both of them are very much orienter towards CDrom 
or online multimedia creation.

Regarding MAX/MSP and PD I must say they are quite nice tools, I 
specially like PD since its free software. They are very nice 
environments for prototyping audio but also visuals (thanks to external 
libraries such as Jitter and GEM). They are visual programmin 
environments and as such its quite difficult to create big and complex 
proyects. But the students usually like it very much and learn a lot by 
using them.

However lately I have been using python + pygame and I like it very 
much. I think this is a very good environment for students to learn 
proper programming and also for artists to create visuals etc... 
Together with some other python libraries it could be much more powerful 
and flexible than any of the previous tools I mentioned.

I understand that the main focus of pygame is games but you shuldnt 
underestimate the possibilities that it contains. If I was going to 
design a Multimedia / New Media / Electronic Arts course or MA I would 
incorporate Python and pygame into the core of the course. There are 
hundreds of artists (please dont take me wrong, i dont think an artist 
is "more" or better than a game designer or programmer) that are at the 
moment starting to use tools like the ones I mention above for the 
development of their work. I have met so many of them over the last 
months in different courses I have been doing in several universities of 
Europe. We have been lately trying to introduce people into Python and 
pygame but yet looks like they preffer to use something like Flash 
because it is more easy to use. But I have seen so many people doing 
visuals with Flash or Director in concerts and performances and they are 
definitely not the right tools for this.

Very recently there is a tool being developed at the MIT called 
Processing that allows to program in a simplified version of Java to 
create visuals and also sound. In many senses its a bit like pygame. 
This is getting very pupular in the new media art comunity and I am 
wondering why something like pygame is not. I believe that Pygame can be 
used to produce anything that can be done in Processing, it just takes a 
little bit more time to do it and you have more control over it. But 
Processing sells out very well as they have a fancy website and are 
reviewed in many artistic mailing lists etc..

I dont like it very much because it is very "controled" by the MIT and 
the licence it is propietary (if i am right, at least is not a opoen 
source project with a comunity around).

I guess the porpouse of this email is to try to bring attention to the 
fact that pygame can be used for so many different things on top of 
creating games (which i think its great of course). And in my opinion 
this should be taken into account when creating future versions of 
Pygame in order to be able to for example combine other python libraries 
together with pygame (like for example wxpython at the moment it doesnt 
like OSX and its really dodgy under windows).

I imagine an open source proyect that would replace Flash or Director 
but also would go much further than those restricted and limited 
environments. I believe that there would be thousands of people 
interested in such a tool like this.

this was my 5 cents ;-)

--
enrike ::