Pyweek 04.2011, what libraries are people gonna use?

shundread on 2011/03/05 13:39

I'm thinking of using Pygame + PyODE. I'll use PyOpenGL only if I decide to get fancy with the graphics / special effects, which is very unlikely.

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hidas on 2011/03/05 15:59:

As this is my first Pyweek, I'm just sticking to what I know and using pygame.

Cosmologicon on 2011/03/05 17:43:

I only know pygame and pyOpenGL. I keep trying to learn something new, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe I'll give cocos or a GUI library a try this time.

richard on 2011/03/05 21:52:

I'll probably just stick with pyglet as usual, maybe with cocos2d. As usual :-)

I feel a strong desire to write a simple-as-chips old-school platformer. I'm hoping the theme ends up being suitable.

superjoe on 2011/03/05 22:53:

I've only barely used pygame. I've used Ogre in C++ but found it difficult to use. I'll probably stick to a 2D game. I was going to, for practice, create a simple platformer between now and the start of pyweek, but I wouldn't be allowed to use that code as reference, so it may not be worth it.

shundread on 2011/03/06 11:05:

PyODE might actually help you with building a platformer, big time.

But honestly, try not to decide the style of your game before knowing the theme. Deciding too early might limit your possibilities.

tartley on 2011/03/07 10:23:

Having spent six months frantically pasting together a 3D OpenGL vector-graphics library, I'll probably end up writing a 2D sprite game.

killdream on 2011/03/07 13:22:

I'm thinking about using the EFL Python bindings (Evas/Edje/Elementary for graphics, Emotion for sound stuff). Haven't ever tried them though, but I still have a little more than 20 days to do so~

jtrain on 2011/03/12 10:30:

I use greg ewing's Albow library in every Pyweek challenge. It makes short work of professional looking menu systems.

shundread on 2011/03/13 20:20:

If you're learning a new library in order to use it for Pyweek, can you post some notes about your experiences with it?

dummey on 2011/03/19 07:59:

Pyglet for me again. It's treated me well before and I see no reason to make a switch.

richard on 2011/03/20 04:39:

I'm currently attempting to learn Newton through newpy. Using pyglet for the other stuff, of course. Was a bit tricky just getting it to compile on my MacBook, but I got there. Making the game runnable by others could be a challenge :-(

richard on 2011/03/21 00:17:

Damn, it looks like I'm going to have to add a bunch of stuff to the newpy API. Not likely to get released before the challenge either. At least it'll be better, stronger, probably not faster.

theMDproject on 2011/03/27 17:17:

Also my first time,
I think I will use the combination PyGame, Cocos and Pyglet

gizmo_thunder on 2011/03/28 08:28:

I might stick with pyglet. It's been really good to me :)

adrwen on 2011/03/28 11:02:

Functools and Itertools are really cool, I might include those.

gcewing on 2011/03/28 22:29:

PyGame and Albow for me. Possibly also PyOpenGL, depending on style of game.

mauve on 2011/03/28 23:49:

Oh, Newton is open source now? I played around with it once under Python-Ogre but I abandoned it when I realised it wasn't open source.

I know almost nothing about the merits of one physics library versus another. I would be interested to know why people choose to work with the ones they do.

richard on 2011/03/28 23:58:

Yeah, Newton is open source now!

But newpy is very, very, very rough at the moment as the core developer and I have started on it again from scratch using cython instead of ctypes. This has proved to be both good (way less bizarro errors to do with poor type handling) and bad (some of the API is quite tricky to deal with at the cython level).

Also the cython version will be faster and have helpers, which is good.

If you're curious the current efforts are here: https://bitbucket.org/resurtm/newpy

gcewing on 2011/03/29 04:12:

I'm also happy to hear that Newton is open source now. It's always sounded interesting, but I was discouraged by its close-sourcedness before. After my experiences with ODE, not having to tweak parameters sounds very good! I'll definitely be checking it out next time I want a physics library.

malcolmt on 2011/03/29 09:27:

Probably just pyglet for me and mostly just for the OpenGL bindings. Mostly wanting to focus on implementing some AI behaviour ideas, which will all just be straight Python (enough batteries included there).

mauve on 2011/03/29 10:37:

Are there any Python scenegraph libraries that meet these criteria?

Install in Ubuntu with aptitude, pip or dpkg.
Similarly convenient to install on Windows/Mac.
With comprehensive and up-to-date documentation.

The closest seems to be Panda3D but I'm fairly sure there are huge omissions in its documentation.

phoe6 on 2011/03/29 13:52:

I plan to use pygame as I have used it in the past. But I try to read the tutorials of pyglet and others engines which have been mentioned in this thread. Try them all out and mainly focus on their example codes and then depending upon the theme, I would build on top of the examples and completely go ahead with the game. (You might have guessed, this is a newbie's approach).

malcolmt on 2011/03/31 11:52:

So I just spent the better part of the evening buried deep in the latest release of pyglet. Since I last used it, I've changed laptop graphics drivers (now using nvidia proprietary driver on Linux) and it doesn't work without a patch. So pyglet's lack of a release since Jan, 2010 is hurting me there. I also found a couple of mailing list threads discussing the "excitement" of pyglet on Mac OS X. Got it working on my Linux install in the end, but it felt fragile enough,

I think I'll switch to just using PyOpenGL directly and integrate with pygame or wxWindows or something for system integration if doing it directly gets too bothersome.

superjoe on 2011/04/01 14:36:

I spent a few minutes going over the API for Pyglet. Looks great. I'm going to use it rather than PyGame.

phoe6 on 2011/04/01 14:59:

Me too. Going for pyglet instead of pygame. I might use PyMunk for the physics layer.

cyhawk on 2011/04/02 23:50:

I love Pyglet, but I've just discovered that it doesn't work on Snow Leopard. I'll desperately try Pygame or commandeer a 10.5 Mac. I pretty much only have tomorrow for PyWeek, so I can't spend it wrestling libraries :).