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Re: [pygame] Where to next?
Rene Dudfield wrote on 2003-07-18:
> Pete Shinners wrote:
>
> > Simon Wittber (Maptek) wrote:
> >
> >> It seems to me as if pygame is getting to be a rather stable and mature
> >> gaming library.
> >>
> >> So, where to next?
> >
> > break it of course! :]
> >
> >[good ideas snipped]
>
> Some random comments on various posts...
>
> I much like the idea of having a lower level library, and a higher
> level one on top. I think pygames low levelness is quite good for
> people who want to do things a bit differently. I also very much
> like how it's fairly modular. eg you can swap the audio for
> something else, you can use different image loading libraries quite
> easily etc. Another great thing I like about pygame is that most
> parts of it are very stable. As in interfaces don't change much,
> and the code isn't buggy (Pete fixes stuff real quick!).
>
One of things I really liked when first seing Pygame was the
transparent Numeric integration (surfarray, sndarray). With it I can
easily bridge pygame to other libraries, e.g. PIL, ogg/vorbis
(untested), openGL textures (I saw somewhere examples of openGL
textures created from Numeric arrays). And the power of Numeric
itself, of course. I think in an ideal world there wouldn't be a
single library that does everything, no matter how well designed.
There would be many libararies from which you can pick -- and they all
would talk to each other nicely. This is already happening in the
Python world and I would like more of it. Some points for bridging
pygame to other libraries:
- openGL: I see that good work is being done, I never used openGL so I
can't say more...
- GUIs: many people asked about embedding pygame windows in
wxWindows, Tk, etc.
- Networking: Twisted is probably great for games. A high-level
connection/play library would be nice, this was discussed during the
StrikeOps effort.
- Event loops: both GUIs and networking have their event loops; any
pygame program needs its own one and many games could use higher
level event dispatching frameworks. I wish there would be a
standard event loop the whole world would use ;-). Looks like
Twisted already did the hard work of integrating its reactors with
many other main loops - a standard pygame/Twisted intergration would
be nice. Anothing thing I looked at once was SimPy. I wonder
whether Twisted or SimPy would be convenient for managing events in
games; if not useful out of the box, it would be nice to extend
them.
- Input events description: every library has its own representation
of input events, especailly keyboard events. I wish somebody would
write a generic keyboard abstraction that would work accross
pygame/curses/Tk/wxWindows/etc.
There are surely other areas.
--
Beni Cherniavsky <cben@tx.technion.ac.il>
If I don't hack on it, who will? And if I don't GPL it, what am I?
And if it itches, why not now? [With apologies to Hilel ;]