Library to use

Quikli on 2014/10/04 21:57
— edited on 2014/10/04 21:58

Hi Everyone!

I'm excited to be participating in my first PyWeek challenge.

Is everyone mostly planning on using pygame or pyglet? It seems like there are quite a good deal of low-level options (SFML, OpenGL, SDL..) and a bunch of wrappers for these (PySDL2, PySDL2_cffi, pysfml, pyglet, pygame, pygame_cffi, kivy...). In addition, it seems like most people historically have used Python 2 instead of Python 3.

I'm thinking of using PySDL2 with PyPy, but i'm worried it could be a mistake since people could have a hard time getting the correct dependencies installed if using less commonly used libraries. I don't have a lot of experience distributing python applications. Anyone think it's a bad idea to stray from pygame or pyglet for pyweek?

Cheers and good luck!

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Comments

blakeohare on 2014/10/04 23:15:

As long as your README has clear instructions even the most obscure libraries are perfectly acceptable. As for me, I generally use the vanilla libraries (just PyGame) and write my code in a common subset of python 2 and 3 so it runs on both. I'm kind of a stickler for universality when it comes to my own code, but even so, when I play other games I always read the README and make sure I use whatever the developer intended for an optimal experience.

Quikli on 2014/10/05 01:05:

Thanks for the advice. I've decided to just use pygame on python3.4 for this time and look into more modern libraries later

dholth on 2014/10/05 17:15:

Thousands of libraries including PySDL2 can be installed with pip. "pip install PySDL2". However some libraries also require that you download and install the native SDL2 libraries separately, a task that varies by platform. You can create a basic setup.py for your project or just list the requirements in a pip-format requires.txt, and pip can automatically install all of your dependencies. Though for a game sometimes it is nicer to your users if you just bundle everything.

starheap on 2014/10/06 14:12:

I use pysdl, and have my code running on both python 2.7 and 3.4. I wouldn't use pypy with pysdl2 because pysdl2 uses ctypes internally, and ctypes is slow on pypy.

dholth on 2014/10/06 16:04:

I wrote pysdl2-cffi specifically because ctypes is very slow in pypy.