making apps, making webs.

There is finally a new release for pygame out. I was the one who did this release(with lots of help from others), and below are some notes on how it went, and what is next for pygame. What is pygame? Pygame is a is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system. Compared to the 1.7.0 release, there is a whole bunch of bug fixes. Compared to the commonly used pygame 1.6.2 there are heaps of changes. A different version of SDL, a different compiler used for the windows version, and a rewrite of the sprite classes. Lots of new people have begun to submit patches and test things out. Which is really nice. We also followed a release plan. Which was made necessary because of the multiple people working on the release compared to one person previously. There is...

Pretend Paper is an arts/music, not for profit website meant to be a place where people can see what is on, and what people are doing. Pretend paper is also a place where you can tell people what creative things you are doing. As well as a place where people can post articles, and reviews of creative things. Pretend paper is a site that has been made with two other people, and I. With contributions from many others. All of us have been taking a break from it since our launch party in July. Which means that it has been a month and a half since my last major code update. What makes pretendpaper interesting from a web development point of view, is the new interface ideas. There are two sides of the site. A tab area on the left, and a tab area on the right. When you are viewing stuff on the left you can click to see something related on the right side of the screen. All without reloading the page. One good use for the tabs is when you are reading the details for an event you will be able...

Work on my shareware game holepit continues. After about a year break from it, recently I have decided to continue to do things on it when I have time. The premise of the game is to move blocks into a hole. Every other part of the game comes from there. To make the game more interesting I am adding a number of incentives to keep playing. One of them is this tunnel special bonus stage. It is kind of like a few different games have used before, where you run down a tunnel collecting things. I am also adding another character modeled by Geoffrey Bantle. The transvestite cleaning lady. Complete with vacuume, and eventually stubble. She should add a bunch more game-play opportunaties, and make it more interesting overall. She will be the fifth character in the game. As the game involves playing against the other characters, there really does need to be more of them for holepit to be fun. The character still needs a lot of work. Maybe another five hours painting. Then another 30 hours anima...

One last thing needs to be done before we can release pygame 1.7 for windows python 2.4. sdl_mixer needs to work. After much fiddling, I managed to get it working with everything except mod playing working. mp3s, oggs, midis, wavs all worked. Hopefully next weekend there will be some goodness, and pygame 1.7 can be released for windows.

I got pygame compiling with python2.4 and mingw+msys today!! Not too many problems were encountered. It needed one distutils patch to make correct paths to feed to gcc. The msys shell needs paths like /c/Python24/lib not c:\Python24\lib. As well as a couple of little fixes in two source files for things that C can't do but a C++ compiler on windows can do. Pete was using the vc6 C++ compiler I think. After those couple of things I had most of the examples up and running :) Now I need to do a few more fixes. First is getting the numeric modules surfarray and soundarray working. I need to download the numeric stuff for that to happen. Next is to fix up the config.py file and the config_mingw.py file to generate an acceptable Setup file. As well as detecting dependencies correctly with msys. Then comes the task of finding all the api differences in the latest SDL. I also need to compile the latest SDL. Finally we need integrate and test all the patches that hav...