This will be fun. First time ever i participate in a contest :-) Have barely written any games the past 10 years but i feel positive.

I am excited to participate in pyweek again. I had wholly forgotten about the competition since.. '06 i think, but then recently hacking a little pygame code (trying to simulate ants and emergence), I remembered how much fun the competiton!

What kind of topics might be on the table for March 30th?

Bright Black has gone from a solo effort to a team entry with the addition of Jack Nutting of Stockholm, Sweden.

In other news, we are using google code to coordinate our project. http://code.google.com/p/brightblack/

This release includes Fully fully automatic Shader Generation. So if you don't know shader math but still want to use shader take a look!








Other features - there is so many its hard not to make it look like a laundry list:
Main features for me are:
complete python support
out of the box working everything on linux
supper stable + debugging + performance monitoring

I am sure you will find some thing you need:

Full Python Integration
Automatically-generated wrappers expose full functionality of engine.

* Highly optimized: all core functionality in C++
* Thoroughly-tested: two commercial MMOs in python
* Panda3D structures garbage collected when using Python
* Manual and sample programs use python

Exposes Full Power of Graphics API
Modern OpenGL features exposed directly to Panda3D user:

* High-level shader language: Cg
* Powerful interface between shaders and engine
* Render-to-texture, with ARB_draw_buffers
* Use of depth/shadow textures

Just Works, Right out of the Box
No-hassle install:

* Convenient installer package for Windows
* Only one external dependency: working graphics driver
* Sample programs run right out of Start Menu
* No compilation step needed
* Installers (rpm & deb) for Linux too

Debugging Tools
Heavy emphasis on error tolerance and debuggable code:

* Extreme resistance to crashing, even when errors are made
* More than 5000 assertion-checks to catch errors early
* Reference-counted data structures minimize memory leaks
* Many tools to examine internal state (one shown here)

Performance Monitoring
Powerful performance monitoring and optimization tools:

* Identifies bottlenecks, both CPU and GPU
* CPU time use decomposed into more than 250 categories
* Counts meshes, polygons, textures, transforms, state changes, etc
* Allows user-defined CPU-usage categories
* Tools for batching and state-change minimization
* Toos to merge textures and minimize texture switches

Mature, Complete System
Mature system used to deliver several commercial games.
Contains everything you need, not just the "sexy" stuff:

* Converters for older file formats
* Font file importers
* Tool to package games into redistributables
* Means to pack art assets into encrypted bundles
* Lots of other boring but essential stuff

Commercial Games Already done with panda3d:

* Disney's Toontown
* Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Online
* SimOps Studios: Code3D
* MSA's Thermal Enforcer
* Little Mermaid Pinball, Aladdin Pinball, and Pirates Pinball

I've roped in a friend (Mix Tape) to do art, which is a huge load off my mind. I had a maybe on sound (effects and music), but he backed out, so I'm still trying to fill that hole. I'd really like to get another coder on the team, but I've pretty much exhausted my friend base and nobody is interested. More than experience I'm hoping the compo nets me some new friends and contacts.

Well another exciting Pyweek is coming up! We're planning out goals and throwing around vague generalities of ideas, planning roles and psyching ourselves up for the weeklong rush of caffeine and adrenaline.

Richard, thanks for putting this on again! How is the Skellington for this season's challenge? Are we aiming to have py2exe functionality working? Anything we can do to help?

Welcoming new member Kwindu to the Spark Spark Boom Team! ^_^

This is my first entry to PyWeek and really (what I hope will be) my first complete game. You have to start somewhere...

I'll probably be hosting the code somewhere at code.google.com or through a bzr repository on my site (adambachman.org). My development platform is an Ubuntu box with a 1 GHz AMD proc and 256MB of ram, so I plan to run light and fast. Here's to hoping...

EDIT: I wasn't aware this would be posted to the main pyweek feed. Feel free to ignore it.

That's right, not just pawned or owned but CLAIMED!!! :) I'm sorry, but I would suspect it is to be expected to talk a little trash during this competition. Visit the Functory to see what I'm doing for a warmup.

Hey rich - It seems the rss feed got stuck? Last story is "happy valentines day". Tried refreshing the feed but no banannas.