Re: [pygame] Advice on Game Engine

[Bob Ippolito <bob@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 3, 2005, at 11:34 PM, Jasper wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>
> > On May 3, 2005, at 9:55 PM, Jasper wrote:
> >
> >
> > > OpenGL offers a 2D game smooth scrolling, zooming and rotation.    
> > > There are several frameworks like Pyui (which is ok, but  
> > > defunct)  built on top of OpenGL+Pygame, but you can also combine  
> > > it with  something like wxPython if you don't need much control  
> > > over your  widgets.
> >
> >
> > You can't combine ANY GUI toolkit (wxPython, GTK, etc.) with  
> > pygame  in a cross-platform fashion, because SDL sacrifices that  
> > feature for  platform independence and ease of development.  If  
> > you're using  wxPython, you're going to have to toss pygame, or  
> > run them in  separate processes (threads is not good enough cross- 
> > platform).
>
> Good point about crossplatform-ness.  I only played around with it  
> a little, but by my recollection you didn't have to run pygame and  
> wxPython in seperate processes or seperate threads, although it was  
> a bit of a pain in the ass to get them to work together (especially  
> if you wanted Twisted too) as each part wanted it's mainloop to be  
> in charge.

Well I have written a reactor for Twisted that allows a foreign event  
loop to be in charge, so long as it has a thread safe and hopefully  
fast way to send a message to the main event loop <http:// 
bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/04/17/twisted-and-foreign-event-loops/>.

This scheme isn't sufficient to integrate two GUI frameworks cross- 
platform, because there are other problems that have nothing to do  
with Twisted.  However, it does make using Twisted painless in just  
about any reasonably sane scenario (using Twisted plus one of PyObjC,  
wxPython, pygame, etc.).

> What makes you say they need to be in seperate processes?

Because wxWidgets and SDL can't live in the same process at the same  
time on all platforms.  Mac OS X can only have one main event loop,  
and it must be the main thread, so you get one or the other.  Other  
platforms may or may not have similar issues, but in general,  
integrating two GUI frameworks in the same application is a loaded  
gun and a suicide note unless those two frameworks were explicitly  
designed to interoperate.

-bob