Richard Jones' Log

PyWeek number 6 is coming...

Alex and I gave some presentations at the gaming miniconf at linux.conf.au yesterday.

The first bit was a pyglet walkthrough / tutorial sort of thing - I spoke and Alex typed and after 40 minutes we'd implemented a simple 2d shoot-em-up game. There'll be more about that on the pyglet website later, but the basic files are there now (well, except for the actual game source code but it should appear in the next 24 hours).

Alex then gave a 20-minute talk about pyglet's history and immediate future development. And also demoed some cool games / apps that have been written already. I gave a 15-minute spiel about PyWeek. More on that in another post :)

All up it was an interesting day and I think our presentations went pretty well, even if I was a little lax in preparing the PyWeek presentation and forgot some stuff.

In other news, I'm booked for PyCon 2008. Alex will hopefully be coming along too, but that's dependent on funding. I need to book flights once I've sorted one other detail out. I will be there for the conference and sprints. I'm hoping to see a little of Chicago too...

Rachel and I saw Cloverfield on Friday. I liked it (I'm not alone) but Rachel really didn't like it (she's not alone either).

We also watched the first two episodes of the new Terminator TV show. Before seeing it I was dubious about the premise (oh, it's another teen high-school drama but with Terminators ... wow) but I'm less dubious now that I've seen it. I am very, very frustrated with the sloppy writing though. They took great pains to explain the Terminator universe (the war, Cyberdyne, how time travel doesn't let machines or even clothes through) and then bam, at the start of the second episode they break one of the fundamental rules of time travel that they'd just explained to us.

Spoiler: the bad terminator's head is sent through time with the Connors with no living flesh covering. The Connors (and terminator pal Cameron) arrive all nekkid and sans "not quite nuclear" gun (and also healed up of serious wounds!?) but so does the bad terminator's head -- apparently intact! And why the hell was the terminator's body in a scrapyard?? After all that fuss about the arm in the second movie?

The first stable/production version of pyglet has been released.

Find it at pyglet.org.

pyglet provides an object-oriented programming interface for developing games and other visually-rich applications for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Some of the features of pyglet are:

• No external dependencies or installation requirements. For most application and game requirements, pyglet needs nothing else besides Python, simplifying distribution and installation.
• Take advantage of multiple windows and multi-monitor desktops. pyglet allows you to use as many windows as you need, and is fully aware of multi-monitor setups for use with fullscreen games.
• Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid.

pyglet is provided under the BSD open-source license, allowing you to use it for both commercial and other open-source projects with very little restriction.

... but if you keep accusing me of being being a virus or spyware when I do searches I'm gonna use another search engine!

Also, my home Optus broadband connection is not in Germany! I should not need to be a web developer to figure how to convince you I'm not in Germany either! I still haven't figured how to convice you I'm in Australia, but the US will do for now. I miss localised searches though.

The EEE PC has Python 2.4 and 2.5 installed. It runs pyglet fine as long as you setenv PYGLET_VSYNC=0 or the opengl driver has a fit. It has a bunch of modules installed to 2.4 by default (including Imaging, pygtk, pyqt, pygnome and cairo). There doesn't seem to be a dependency on the 2.5 install - I'm not sure why it's there, but I'm glad it is :)

It sure is a great little machine. That's it pictured on top of my work Dell laptop.