Re: [pygame] pygame performance

[Lionel Barret de Nazaris <lionel.bdn@xxxxxxx>]

Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> I used to use Blitz Basic to develop games some time ago. Now, I want 
> to play with the wonderful world of game development again. I've found 
> python to be a extremelly elegant, powerful and easy to use language, 
> so, pygame seems to fit perfectly for what I'd like to do. However, 
> I've seen some games made with pygame and found that their overall 
> rendering speed is quite slow if you compare to other languages (Blitz 
> Basic is actually quite fast). Maybe it was an isolated issue but I'd 
> really like to know from more experinced developers on the performance 
> of python/pygame.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Marcelo.
Mmm...i don't know much about blitz basic but AFAIK it is a static typed 
/ compiled language.
Python is interpreted which make it slower (it cannot guess the 
execution path as almost anything can be changed at runtime).
For most app, the relative slowness in not important and largely 
compensated by the productivity boost.

Games are in the gray area. the many loops (rendering, collision, etc) 
imply many function calls which is slow in python.
Complex 3D (like seen in commercial AAA games) is quite out of the 
question for now *but* simple games are very easy to do. With the help 
of openGL it quite easy to get over 100 fps.

So except if you want to code the next Unreal, you should have 
everything you need.