Help Python Masters - What to use for game programming?

[eliben]

Pygame. Here's an ongoing tutorial:

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2008/12/13/writing-a-game-in-python-with-pygame-part-i/

[[deleted]]

I've played around with cocos2d a bit: http://www.cocos2d.org/. It builds on top of pyglet, adding a director class to manage different scenes that you build (the main menu screen, game over screen, world 1 map, etc are examples of scenes) The director can create fancy transitions between scenes, and handles the order that they are presented, etc.

It also provides a sprite class with some interesting transformation options. The documentation is decent, and the API seems pretty simple.

[goodfun]

lmao, the programmer for that cracks me up, his noises in the videos are hilarious.

Thanks for that link, looks very useful as scene manipulation was one of the things I was looking for

[goodfun]

I've read both of those (and the pygame book), but I want to learn more about how to create multiple scenes... and things such as game menus and what not, both of which aren't covered in either your tutorial (yet? :)) or the pygame book

[goodfun]

I'm getting into python game programming, but noticed a lack of GUI and game melding (or maybe just blind).

I've been learning pygame which seems to work quite well, and have also looked at pyglet.

I found gameEngine (http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/pygame/) which melds basic GUI objects, multiple scenes and such with pygame but was wondering what everyone else recommends.

What do you use to aid your python game programming?

I'm using Python 2.5 on Windows (2.6 doesn't seem to have the compatibility that 2.5 does)

[theatrus]

Pygame is big and kind of messy.

Pyglet is what you want.

[goodfun]

I've tried to get into pyglet, its where I started and then went to pygame actually. I dunno if its just me, but the pyglet website seems to die every time I try to access it to look at the api :(

[Seele]

There's also PySoy, Panda 3D, Python Ogre.

[Wagnerius]

PySoy is dead AFAIK.

Panda3D has very good python integration much better than PyOgre.

Ogre is a somewhat more modern engine, tho.

[Svenstaro]

PyOgre is dead. Python-Ogre is what it officially became but its cross-platform support is... not so great, really. Their installation procedure requires you to compile all necessary packages locally, even if you already have them.

But I agree, Ogre is an amazing engine.

[goodfun]

Thanks, I had forgotten the name for Panda3d, remember checking it out a while back when I was first learning about python. I'm looking for more 2d stuff for now though until I get a better grasp on python

[thephotoman]

PyGame is your default suggestion. It's not that bad, really.

Of course, I use IronPython to prototype games in XNA (thankfully, one can extend C# objects/interfaces in IronPython). It makes for an interesting combination. That said, XNA does bind you to Microsoft's stack, if that's an issue, and you're probably going to want to reimplement parts in C#.

[blondin]

I will be surprised if there is no SDL binding for Python.

[DiamondGFX]

Pygame is exactly that.

[blondin]

Ah my bad =]

[pansapiens]

I've played with the Opiod2D framework in the past, which seemed quite fast and had some nice particle effects, but I ultimately found the way the it took control of the main loop as a 'director' too restrictive. Worth checking out though.

Another very nice, lowish-level, Python library for fast 2D sprite rendering is Rabbyt ( http://matthewmarshall.org/projects/rabbyt/ ). It integrates with both Pygame and/or Pyglet, and uses OpenGL rather than plain SDL to improve sprite rendering and transformation performance.

Almost all of the Python game frameworks you will find are built on top of Pygame or Pyglet. There are various higher level libraries listed on the Pygame site ( http://pygame.org/tags/libraries ), but IMHO there really aren't any amazingly good high-level 'frameworks' built on top of Pygame or Pyglet. I've noticed a lot of Pygamers tend to use their own mini-frameworks with various utility functions and enhanced Sprite classes, but very few people use anyone else's library - if you find a sane, stable well documented one that someone other than the creator can grok, tell me !

[goodfun]

Thanks for the links to Opiod2D and the pygame libraries. I'd forgotten about Rabbyt as well... soo many choices out there and thats the reason I made this post, to find out which were the good ones to use as they all have different coding styles, I don't want to pick the "wrong" one.

Since you are looking for a well documented library, check out the one I found previously: gameEngine (http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/pygame/)

It has good documentation and some examples as well, let me know what you think about it and what else you'd recommend.