I tried making an exe, but got this strange error... has it to do with the skellington or did I do smth wrong?

C:\simono-0.4\dist>run_game.exe
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run_game.py", line 3, in ?
NameError: name '__file__' is not defined

so it's already grinding to an halt in run_game?? other people of succesfully provided exe... so what's my mistake?

Yesterday I got the balloon and crow behavior classes implemented. The crow was fairly simple, but the balloon took more effort to get right than I had expected.

In my first attempt, the balloon would instantly rise when the flame was on, but that wasn't very realistic. The flame heats the air in the balloon, which will increase lift, which in turn will get the balloon going up. It is kind of a slow process and my current implementation simulates it pretty good. It took some fiddling to find the right balance between the correct physical behavior and not causing too much player frustration. :-) I will probably have to do more finetuning once everything is implemented, but this is a good start.

I decided that (as is the case with a real hot air balloon) no directional control will be implemented. Instead, there will be windy layers in the trench, so the player will have to raise and lower the balloon into these layers if the balloon needs to be nudged in a certain direction. These layers will also pose a challenge as they may push the balloon into a wall. Besides the challenges of avoiding crows, limited fuel supply and catching parachuted fuel, having to work with these windy layers will add a puzzle-like aspect to the game that should make it more fun to play.

Didn't have much time to work on the game today, so I didn't finish implementing all the gameplay as planned. I have mocked up the level: the collision model and some of the triggers. The triggers now advance the game state, so it's coming together.

The game won't really be playable until the baddie AI is in, which I'm thinking is going to be tricky; don't really know how to go about it.

Used a spare hour in between classes today to draw up the baddie model:

As of tomorrow I'm on holidays so hopefully I'll catch up.

I'm having a problem with rendering vertex-arrays with pyOpenGL 2. The problem only appears on some installations, and with pyOpenGL 3 everything is fine.

The problem is that opengl seems to keep a reference to the vertex-array, which i have to update every frame, which leads to a memory leak.

this is how i do it..

co_s = co.tostring() # co is an array('f')
glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, co_s)
glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, vertcount)

How should i make opengl release the buffer after it's used?

version 2 is considered the latest stable release right? i'd really like to drop the support for it, but since version 3 isn't shipped with ubuntu that doesn't seem to be an option :/

also; i have written a small optimization for keyframe animations as a compiled module in c. is that allowed, as long as the source is included and there is a fallback on a slower python-routine?

WE HAVE LIFTOFF

Substantial parts of the game are now playable. A basic probe can be launched with specified speed and direction, and you can watch its progress as it coasts through the star system.

It's starting to look really good, too. I'm trying to strike a balance between implementing features and keeping the production values up consistently.

Also, I'm having a blast doing this. This could have a lot of educational potential -- I'm learning heaps about rocket propulsion and orbital mechanics!

I've done the SVG files for the spy character and one enemy helicopter - some previews have been posted as screenshots.

I'm currently writing a Menu class for GooeyPy that will automatically arrange a list of items into a menu. I'm going to start coding on the rest tomorrow.

I've decided to go to bed before midnight tonight - crazy idea.

I got the opening splash screens and "cinematic" working. Something seems a little off with the timing of the cinematic, but I'm letting it go for now.

Still to do:

• score at the end of levels
• pause menu
• space station
• wormholes
• save/replay
• AI
• main menu
• options menu

That kind of seems like a lot, but I feel good about it. The cinematic was an idea I had for a while, but it came together nicely.

Talking to you at PyCon was infectious, so here I am. I was sitting across the table from you on Thursday before you had to leave to catch your plane.

Well, personal life being what it is, I have yet to write any code. Let's see what we can do with the time still remaining!

Well, I have been really busy today, and have only had about 4-5 hours to code, but in that time I accomplished more than the previous days combined :)

Here is what we've got now:

A new game idea!
some placeholder graphics
isometric map
plants that grow, and then die

Schedule for rest of compo:

tomorrow:
Finish game-play aspects(buying of plots, planting, harvesting, enemies, random attacks, enemy/player interaction(think ughlympics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveman_Ughlympics)
and get level-loading going...
Thursday:
implement new graphics, maybe make some myself...
add menus, inter-level graphics, tutorial
Friday:
finish game-play,
tweak everything to perfection
finish anything else that comes up!
Saturday:
add sfx/music
test it all
fix anything that is broken
and finally, add whatever else is needed, like saved games, to the game until it is over-flowing with goodness :D

Well, that is going to be a very busy schedule, but it looks like it is definitely feasible, Good night all, and good luck. :D