[pygame] pygame, Max/MSP and PD

["Rob Bothof" <rob@untouchablegraphics.nl>]

I've been working with pygame/python and max and pd. For my studies in the
art academy I've written a program in pygame which receives motiontracking
coordinates from max msp, makes visuals and sends data to pd for making
sound. I was using OSC at first but i've noticed that is it not really
neccessairy. both PD and MAX/MSP have objects called 'netsend' and
'netreive', (UDP and TCP possibilities) they come with the standard
distributions so no need to install extra externals and can talk right away
with the python socket.
It works great, at least inside a LAN...connecting things over internet may
be a bit insecure though, but this is maybe the same with OSC.

grtz Rob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Ippolito" <bob@redivi.com>
To: <pygame-users@seul.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 1:09 AM
Subject: Re: [pygame] multimedia pygame


On May 12, 2004, at 6:41 PM, enrike wrote:

>>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> You can also "drive" PD (and MAX/MSP) using pyOSC.
>>>> Actually it can be very interesting to implement part of the
>>>> "patch" in python
>>>> using OSC to receive data from the PD patch and sending back some
>>>> controls/events.
>>>
>>>
>>> this is exactly what i am doing!
>>> Actually we developed a simple API for the pyOSC implementation by
>>> Daniel Holth so that students or people that dont understand (or
>>> cannot be bothered) sockets and studff like that can use OSC in a
>>> very simple way, we are planning to release it in a few days.
>>>
>>> We want create "controllers" for PD, Supercollider, MAX/MSP and
>>> other programs that understand OSC.
>>>
>>> You can have a look at what we have been doing so far in.
>>> www.ixi-software.net/content/software.html
>>> Check out SpinOSC as this the direction we are planning to move from
>>> now on.
>> I did an event driven OSC implementation in Python on top of Twisted
>> a couple years ago for a performance piece at a new media festival.
>> Are you guys just polling?  I started working on a high level game
>> development framework, currently on top of pygame, and I'm like 80%
>> done with a Pygame Twisted reactor.  It uses the pygame clock and
>> event sink, but does the select loop in a separate thread, which
>> generates a pygame event and in turn iterates the reactor.  In the
>> cases where pygame events aren't necessary (most of the stuff I've
>> done doesn't require ultra-responsive user input), I've just used the
>> Twisted reactor to iterate pygame
>> (reactor.callLater(delayUntilNextFrame, self.nextFrame) sort of
>> style).
>
> ok!. would it be possible to get the code? is it finished? We did a
> simple version that keeps pulling for incomming messages. We are using
> OSC really intensively in some of our experiments and I think we would
> benefit a lot from a highly optimised implementation of python OSC.

I don't even know if I still have it, it was a one-off performance
piece, I don't regularly deal with OSC.  I wasn't actually using it for
music either, I was talking to some image recognition software written
in MAX/MSP (crazy dutch people!).  In any event, it probably deserves
to be rewritten because Twisted's UDP support is totally different now
and I'm a few years better at Python and I have some really cool ideas
for how to develop binary protocols (both wire and file) that I would
like to implement and experiment with.  It would be a pretty good
excuse.

I'm not going to have time to really even think about doing anything
until next week at the earliest.. going to BSDCan tomorrow, won't be
back until Monday.. and I have some friends coming in from out of town
as soon as I get back so I may be a bit distracted from the regular
freelance/open source development grind :)

>>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> Can you send/share some link about "Processing" in order to have a
>>>> look at it?
>>>
>>>
>>> I think its someting like www.processing.net
>>> this was an old link to the demo but it might have changed
>>> http://proce55ing.net/download/alpha.html
>>>
>>> Looks like they plan to release open source in the future but not at
>>> the moment.
>> It's been planned for a while, but never happened.  It is a bit like
>> pygame, but it uses Java syntax and mostly OpenGL sort of semantics
>> (though it is bitmap based).  Something written in
>> pygame+Numeric+PyOpenGL could do the same thing, but probably be much
>> nicer to use and more flexible.
>
>
> this is the kind of stuff I was refering to in my first email.
> i think if somebody puts together some package, or maybe some
> guidelines to ease the complexity of getting into all these different
> libraries, this would be great for many people. I was checking out
> PyOpenGL recently and I had the feeling that this is great and very
> fast but also that not being myself into 3D it was going to take me
> ages to be a ble to use it properly for 2D. Pygame is much more
> related to what I am used to, however still it lacks some things I
> (and many others i guess) would need, like integrating into wxpython
> in my particular case.

OpenGL isn't very hard to use for 2D, you really only need to figure
out how to setup an orthographic projection, and how to manage
textures.  The NeHe tutorials probably cover that, I guess.  If you're
doing OpenGL with wxPython, you might as well not use pygame at all..
or at least, not for anything but sound, but even then there are better
sound libraries than pygame's that you could be using.

You're just going to cause yourself pain if you want both wxPython and
SDL to talk to the mouse+keyboard.  Integrating multiple event loops is
not for the faint of heart, and requires some pretty deep insight into
how each of them works.  In the 2D rapid game development framework I'm
prototyping, pygame is just an implementation detail.  Eventually,
pygame will probably just be a fallback for when OpenGL isn't
available, and the timing/event handling will probably be done
per-platform (or at least, I would really like to use platform-specific
stuff on OS X.. I might keep SDL for the others).  I definitely want to
be using something with floating point rectangles, if nothing else :)

-bob