well the network is killing me. Linux and windows seam to handle networks deferently plus there are fire walls everywhere. I found that my firewall been a problem. Well i dont know hiw people would be able to connect and play my game... i might loose soly to connection problems.

Whee.. now we can place objects and move them around and see how the steam and water react. Don't worry, the gaminess is not too far away now!

Have a play: rushed.tar.gz (requires pygame & pyopengl). Click to place an object, click&drag to reposition it, and click and drag the rotation handles (shown below) to rotate it. Easy eh?

Ok, my first screenshot is uploaded since I finished the first animated animal last night. The player needs to use the steam-powered claw to capture things runnign across the screen. A bit simplistic, but what are you gonna do?

I still need to add in some interesting characters to run across the screen, but the bulk of the game engine is complete. It still needs sound (which I've never done before) and menus/levels, which shouldn't be too hard.

I think I went down the right track keeping this game so simple. I should be able to actually finish!

Combining PyODE and pygext continues to prove to be challenging. A Euclidean frame of reference with the usual x and y directions and angular mapping in radians will require a set of translation functions to convert to pygext's frame of reference, where 0 degrees starts at twelve o'clock.

Because of the sparse documentation of pygext, one basically has to experiment with the system to figure out the behaviour and its underlying frame of reference. It's a little like discovering a new physical realm.

The moral is to test early and often. Weaving whole cloth code before running means that you'll probably have to rewrite most of your code because some notions you had of the framework are false.

But at least now our glider behaves as if it really is being driven by the steam jets!

here's our latest interface...
George.

Here's the snapshot of our work thus far, not on this server due to size:
http://www.wardtek.ca/pyweek/pyweek2-day3.zip

Alright. Not much actual hard coding done today, but a lot of progress. I put in the basic state switching needed to make it go from an engine into a game. Played around with sound and graphics and other pretty baubles. Some things still don't work quite right, but that's a battle for another day. Erik and I spent about 2 hours trying to squish Drew's 11 meg wav file of our intro music into something manageable before TenjouUtena pointed out that yes, we are retarded and pygame does ogg by default. There was much rejoicing.

Under the hood I migrated yet more variables out of hard coding (damn we put in a lot of those) and made a configuration file for graphics settings and the like. Erik has been poking around with our actual steam mechanics and got the basics set up, though they don't actually affect the physics yet. Harry informed us that after being up until 2 am last night we have the groundwork for AI. A dumb AI, but that'll come with time. Cory, our big giant head, informed us that he's worked out several algorithms for the collision detection we'll be using. Drew sent in his first music sample and promised more on the way. Someone called looking for Scott, but we didn't know where he was either. Kate oooed and ahhhed. All in all, a good day.

I've made the cop model today.. from the scratch textures and model.
I've made the model using AC3D texturing in gimp.
Find the screen shot of cop model here

Download and play here: zip file source

new graphics!

Can also shoot baddies, and shoot the walls.

I've started putting in more game play stuff. Now all of the unit types use the same base class. So they all use steam, and need coal & water to make steam.

We did a few speed optimizations to hopefully get it running at 30FPS even with lots of baddies, and particle effects on screen.

Aka has done some new graphics. But he's not finished yet, still a bunch to go.

We also still have a lot of game play elements to finish. As well as to do the interface, menu screen, credits screen, etc etc.

We need to start putting in some sounds and music. Tim has made one song which sounds really cool! But it's not included yet.

Download the latest if you'd like to try it... got character animation going, with spanner action (hold SHIFT and direction arrow to hit) and run it in fullscreen (-fs) for full graphical glory!

I have an issue. It's a sound issue. I can't find a way to play mp3 or ogg files directly through pygame mixer. I've had people suggest pymedia, but that's a no go for us because it doesn't have macintosh support. As our sound guy uses a mac exclusively, it'd kinda suck for him not to be able to enjoy the fruits of his labour. So I ask your help and I seek suggestions.

What can I do? The big thing is size. A 1.6 MB mp3 vs an 11 MB wav is a huge difference. I can't seem for the life of me to find any 'pure' python mp3 or ogg decoders. They all seem to rely on some external recompiled binary. So what can I do? How do you all deal with these restrictions?

Check out our intro theme here.