Pygame weekly mini sprint 2007/05/16

This week there were a number of patches, and bug reports to the mailing list.

Marcus got to most of them - fixing up some 64bit issues, as well as some crashes with hardware surfaces inside the transform module. Thanks to John Myers, John Poppleweel, and Christopher Stone.

Marcus also added some more warnings for gcc. Which you can enable with the command:
python setup.py build -bigw

Marcus then went through and got rid of a bunch of problems that the warnings showed.


I committed sprite changes that John Krukoff proposed in an email to the mailing list last week. They allowed the sprite module to be extended with regards to collision detection. We fixed up a slight performance problem with it for the existing type of collision detection it does.

I started to look at adding the bitmask collision stuff into the sprite module - and then noticed we weren't using a lot of its functionality. Then we got onto discussing collision response... and I wrote another big email to the mailing list about that. The subject of the email thread is:
"[pygame] [Announce] Python bindings for the bitmask collision detection library"
It hasn't appeared to have made it to the archives.

Marcus got into working on the alpha compositing patch. After some tests he found that it was slightly faster for small surfaces, but up to two times slower for large surfaces. So he plans on looking at tweaking some loops, and I plan to tighten up the graphics.

Jacob- wanted to know what could be done by someone who doesn't know C that well. Pygame needs unittests. Testing what happens with different inputs to functions is one area that needs testing. Like what happens if I pass -1 into a set clip function? Also the example programs could be extended or changed. Especially the sprite module needs unittests for the collision functions - since we plan on refactoring them soon. So Jacob- said he would make some unittests for the sprite module. the test/sprite_test.py is where they would go.

JKrukoff is writing another proposal for sprite collision - but this time using a more OO api. Possibly with mixins. To see how that API would turn out. He's also working on a proposal to add a Vector class to pygame - for the collision response stuff. But sshhhhh - don't tell anyone.





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