Re: [pygame] Pygame and OpenGL (and deployment)

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

I've been bombing this list with mail this day, so I might as well
continue... :)

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Vince Platt wrote:

>What does it take to deploy an OpenGL application?  I ask this
>because it seems that the likes of Quake III had nothing but problems
>in getting this  to work initially.  As a developer who may even
>charge money for my work (probably not, but that's just how I think),
>I don't want my customer/user to have to install the least bit of
>anything other than the game to make the game work.  I suspect that
>this will be easier under Windows than Linux, although that's
>probably rather obvious.

Getting 3D to work under Linux is a rough ride. Depending on the type of
card it's either "not that hard" to "impossible". Many cards don't have
any support at all, but at least nVidia has ok support and Matrox has some
too. Maybe ATI cards too have some support.

I think you have to install and whack all kinds of weird stuff to get it
to work, and you should have XFree 4.X as well as download binary drivers
from some obscure site somewhere. I think the gfx card vendors should do a
little bit more for the users than just create a little binary driver and
dump it somewhere along with a README.

Under Windows it should be very simple, as the vendors actually *support*
their products there, which is something paying Linux customers still
dream about.

I think nVidia's drivers are the best, if you compare Linux performance to
Windows performance.

Personally I have no hope of getting anything 3D to work on my machine, I
think it's a recipe for frustration and crashes.

>I have successfully developed and deployed a demo app that required
>no pre-existing libraries, etc. but that was just using PyGame+SDL
>(back in the PyGame 0.2 days even).  And judging by some of the
>projects based on PyGame out there that I've tried, that's a known
>problem and not too hard anymore (at least under Windows).

>But with OpenGL?

To do OpenGL under pygame you need to add PyOpenGL to the requirements for
your application. And it in turn adds Mesa (on Linux), so a small little
application can end up with some pretty insane requirements. :) Getting
pygame to work with OpenGL (software rendering only) is quite easy,
although you still need to download quite a lot.

-- 
  "You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could
                  do is give them a meaningful look."
                                              -- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

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