making apps, making webs.

Pyweek 2 has begun. With the "it's powered by steam" theme winning the vote. 190 people have signed up to compete. Not sure how many people voted for themes. Hopefully quite a few people will actually compete. So here is one of our concept sketches that Aaron - aka did. We have a basic web server code done. Using wsgi, twisted.web2, and sqlobject. Since the game is going to have elements where you can affect the worlds of the players from a web page. So even if you don't play with the game, you can have fun messing around with other peoples game worlds. However the web element is going to be an optional part of the game. The game needs to be playable in single player mode. We also have the start of our client main game done. Using pgu, and an isometric game view. You will be able to play as a human who controls a robot castle which is powered by steam. We are currently figuring out what gameplay, and plot we want. But have the basics of what we want to do ...

Here are the themes for the pyweek game development competition. * Someone else's trash * A fraction too much friction * Mind the gap * Doorways * It runs on steam! Much more interesting than last pyweeks abstract ones. It runs on steam! is my favourite so far. It puts the most images into my head. Images of Victorian era steam races, and of a future world which runs on steam powered technology.

Today I did a little test app with PGU and pygame in preparation for pyweek . I have not played with PGU for a while, so thought I needed a little refresher course. PGU works with pygame, and has a gui library as part of it. It's a cross between html, and QT. It even has a basic html renderer. So if you know a little html, you can use some of that knowledge. The result is a simple RPG character attributes generation widget character_create.py It can generate these character attribute scores, and allow the user to assign points to them. I made it reusable so that people can plug in their own character attribute names. Eg - you could have 'Sense' instead of 'Dexterity'. You can put these widgets inside other containers, so that you can generate multiple characters at a time. Our pyweek team The Olde Battleaxe is going to do a few more practice sessions before the competition begins next week. Our team has one sound+music guy, a graphics+sound guy, and two co...

The new python website is up. It mentions web stuff, database stuff, and gui stuff. However it doesn't mention games or graphics stuff at all. Links to pygame.org, and pyopengl.sf.net should be added to the front page. As they are very popular python libraries used for games. Eve online, and the Temple of Elemental Evil are two retail success stories. The witches yarn is a shareware success story, and amongst the open source success stories are angry drunken dwarves, solarwolf, and pydance. Blender, the gimp, poser, truespace, are amongst the graphics programs that use python for scripting. Making learning python scripting for artists very useful. ILM use python for movie making.

When trying to figure out how to use transactions in sqlobject, I found this code snippet. As a bonus my init database code now runs twice as fast. Yah! def do_in_transaction(func, *args, **kw): old_conn = sqlhub.getConnection() conn = old_conn.transaction() sqlhub.threadConnection = conn try: try: value = func(*args, **kw) except: conn.rollback() raise else: conn.commit() return value finally: sqlhub.threadConnection = old_conn # do_in_transaction(some_function_with_sqlobject_stuff_in_it) # I needed to change my connection line to this. That is assign something # to the processConnection thing in sqlhub. # sqlhub.processConnection = db_connection = __connection__ = connectionForURI(config.conn)

It looks like pyweek registrations are open. Pyweek is a realy fun game development competition inspired by the ludumdare 48 hour competitions. Except this competition uses python, it goes for a week, and there can be teams or solo entrants! 0 minutes before the competition begins a theme is announced, and you need to make a game from scratch based on that theme. The idea is to have a lot of fun finishing a game in a week. You don't work for the whole week on the game, just spend a couple of hours a day, and perhaps more on the weekend. So for some people this is better than spending a whole weekend. For anyone interested in making games there is nothing more fun and educational than these competitions. Lots of the fun is all of the energy and excitement you get from looking at other peoples work, and chatting away on irc. Everyone is making a game all at the same time, it's a lot of fun. It is the game making equivalent of a jamming with people in a band. Except you are ...

After a couple of months of part time playing with the pretend paper code base I have put up a new version of this arts community site I work on for a hobby. The most visible change is the modified css design. Which gets rid of black lines, and makes it look more minimal. These changes were done by Dane with help from Aaron. A lot of the changes are not visible, as I rewrote things so that searching and editing are more doable. To make searching and editing how I wanted them to be I needed to be able to have multiple event listing tabs on screen at once. Which meant that I needed to change around the way it used ids to encode a tab id into each of the ids. Also the code for creating new tabs stopped using function callbacks so much, and instead used objects. By using objects I am more easily able to change, and query their behaviour. I cleaned up the javascript code a little, but it still needs a lot of work. However a lot of it is still prototype code, so I'm not finished ...