Re: [pygame] Robustness of OSX support

[Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com>]

On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 17:27 America/New_York, Jeff Mallett 
wrote:

> I'm currently investigating cross-platform solutions (need Windows and 
> OS X) for developing a commercial, full-screen, 2D game.  I would like 
> to start on a demo ASAP.  I've been playing around with pygame on 
> Windows, but haven't tried it on Mac OSX yet.  What I've read makes me 
> think MacOSX support is lagging behind in some areas.
Just SysFont support right now, as far as I know.  You shouldn't really 
count on that working anywhere in the first place, it's not very well 
tested.  Switching between full screen and windowed mode is also 
problematic (seems to work on OS X 10.2, but not 10.3), but that's true 
for more platforms than just OS X.  Doesn't sound like this issue would 
concern you, as your app is full screen.

I've heard nothing but good things about my distribution of Pete's 
SolarWolf 1.3 (full screen pygame), which was released at the end of 
last month.  It's been downloaded almost 4000 times (over 13 gigs of 
traffic!).  Approximately half of that was directly through 
versiontracker (the only place I announced it), but there's a trickle 
down effect for popular software so it ended up on a few similar sites 
accounting for the other half.

> * Is pygame/OSX "ready" as a platform for commercially distributed 
> games?  (stability, speed, support of pygame API set, etc.)  Are there 
> OSX-specific issues to be aware of and what targets (OS versions, 
> hardware) are supported?
OS Versions:  Mac OS X 10.2+ (I've tested on 10.3 builds up to 7B74, no 
issues.. presumably the GM coming out later this month is also 
issue-free, but it has not yet been seeded to ADC members)
Hardware: Whatever runs the OS (some kind of G3 is the low end, but 
I've only owned G4 and G5 hardware so I have no idea as to how old you 
can go)

The only OS X issues you need to be aware of is that you have to know 
what you're doing to make an application bundle that'll work on a stock 
system.  I haven't seen anyone but myself do that for something that 
depends on pygame.  Not that it's terribly difficult or anything, I 
just don't think anyone's really tried very hard lately.  It's also 
*possible* to support Mac OS X 10.1, but you won't find any support for 
that from me.

> * I'll need to integrate with a C++ engine/AI, so if I end up using 
> cross-platform C++ game library, this part would be easy.  How hard 
> would it be to integrate this C++ code with Python code controlling 
> the display, and how would I go about this? (in both Windows and Mac)
Look at Boost.Python and SWIG.  Shouldn't be hard if you write it 
properly.  Compiling the same source code and having it work on gcc and 
vs.net is going to be the hardest part.

As far as OS X support goes, I'm pretty much the OS X maintainer for 
pygame.  Andrew Straw has also contributed a lot to OS X pygame, and 
maintained the "kitchen sink" distribution for the relatively long 
period of time where I wasn't.  These "kitchen sink" distributions are 
no longer necessary, because Python 2.3 works perfectly and has a 
Package Manager application to take care of the 3rd party package issue 
(you can download precompiled packages from the official repository, or 
mine).  I can answer most questions and fix most issues rather quickly 
in my spare time (weekends, some nights), but you'd probably have to 
pay me to help you with the closed source bits or do any sort of 
extensive testing.

-bob