Yesterday, I started thinking about a nicer way to distribute pygame games for Windows users. py2exe sort of does the job, but creating the binary distribution is still sometimes a bit tricky and the resulting package will be several megabytes even for simple games (especially if you use PyOpenGL). This lead to the idea of a launcher application that could be wrapped once with py2exe and then distribute a bare minimum amount of data with each game. The first alpha (simply a proof of concept at the moment) is at http://people.cc.jyu.fi/~shang/pyg/ . The pyglaunch-alpha1-win32.zip contains a premade windows executable, all required libraries, the source and the examples. The idea is that games could be distributed as a single .pyg file (I converted some of my old game projects into pygs as an example). The pyg file is essentially a zipfile that contains a 'py' directory for source files and a 'resoruces' directory for datafiles such as graphics. The 'py' directory must contain a 'pygmain' module that has a function 'run()' that starts the game. Creating the pyg-file doesn't require py2exe or any other special libraries, so this could also make it easier for linux game authors to distribute their games to Windows gamers. In order to load data files from inside the .pyg instead of the file system, the game author must import the module 'pyg' and use 'pyg.openfile' when reading files. Eventually, my plan is to create a friendly windows installer wizard that associates the .pyg extension with the pyglauncer.exe, so that you can just double-click on the game package to run it. Currently, you have to drag-and-drop the pyg files into the pyglauncher.exe (no GUI) or execute 'pyglauncher.exe game.pyg' from the command line. The .pyg files could also contain meta-information that could be used for auto-updating, error reporting etc. The pyglauncher could also develop into a full blown game browser GUI (such as MAMEw32 for example) for pygame games. So, does anyone else think a project like this could be useful? What kind of features would you like to see in the final product? What libraries should be bundled with the launcher (the alpha1 binary release contains a large part of the Python standard library, PyGame 1.6, Numeric 23.5 and PyOpenGL 2.0.1.09, a later release should add at least PyOpenGLContext and twisted for networking)? Would you be willing to distribute your own pygame games in .pyg format? -- Sami Hangaslammi