[OLPC-Games] PyGame is go!

[Kent Quirk]

Hello, everyone.

Thanks to some work by John Palmieri, SDL and PyGame work on the XO, and 
today we demonstrated several existing PyGame games running without 
changes, including sound, graphics, keyboard, and mouse input. 
Furthermore, he's working on integrating it all into the build, which 
includes removing several extraneous dependencies. It's only a short 
time until we have at least a base version available for others to 
experiment with. There will be some ongoing work to remove excess 
libraries and to integrate it properly with GTK and with Sugar. But 
we're now comfortable that it's going to be reasonable to develop games 
using the PyGame toolkit.

So please, feel free to start creating! This will definitely be the 
"preferred" game development platform for the OLPC laptops.

We're attempting to define an entire game creation "stack" of capabilities.

At the bottom is SDL, which is accessible as libsdl in the usual ways 
from C/C++. It's useful for porting existing applications.

On top of SDL lies PyGame, which exposes most of SDL to Python programmers.

Both PyGame and SDL will be trimmed down to remove support that isn't 
applicable, while attempting to avoid breaking the existing APIs. 
(Example: asking for a list of possible video modes might only return a 
single mode -- but we won't remove the mode selection API because to do 
so would break some existing SDL games).

Parallel to SDL will be additional game-oriented support libraries for 
using the hardware specific to the OLPC laptops, such as the camera, the 
microphone, the mesh network, and so forth.

And on top of all of that we hope to create several general-purpose game 
engines and python libraries for making it easy to build simple games in 
various categories. Under consideration are things like:

* An adventure game engine
* A basic arcade game engine
* A basic board game engine
* A few widgets for the creation of straightforward UIs
* Libraries for doing things like player matching for two-player and 
multiplayer games on the mesh, support for the camera as an input 
device, and so forth.


So...if you have ambitions to make games for OLPC, please start thinking 
about PyGame. You can easily get PyGame running on every major desktop 
platform.

When you think about it, please keep in mind some of the limitations of 
the platform:

* Processor speed is low compared to modern desktop PCs. Don't make 
games that depend on a known processor speed for performance. In fact, 
consider inserting a call something like pygame.time.delay(100) into the 
main loop; if the game still plays well like that you've done it right. 
Yes, we realize this limits things like high-frame-rate arcade games. 
But high-frame-rate arcade games that hog the CPU also chew through 
battery life. Some of those might be fun...but we also need games that 
run at a more sedate pace.
* There are going to be interesting performance issues with the screen; 
we'll likely be doing work to make it easier / faster, but if you're 
manipulating colors of objects it might be slow or it might give you 
strange results. Stay flexible if you can on screen size.
* Keep 'em small and light in terms of assets (sound, art). Disk space 
is at a premium.

Please keep an eye on the Game development page on the wiki, along with 
the pages for SDL Implementation and PyGame Implementation. We'll be 
building those out over the next couple of weeks.

All the best,

    Kent



-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Quirk           I'm making a game about global warming.
Game Architect                        Track the progress at:
CogniToy                http://www.cognitoy.com/meltingpoint