Panda3D is a free 3D engine with a set of Python bindings. According to the site, the library is “unusual in that its design emphasis is on supporting a short learning curve and rapid development.”
There are some screenshots and videos available to demo what it can do.
The PyWeek 2 winners have been announced, and the finished games are really quite impressive!
I loaded the winner of the individual entries called Rushed and actually found myself playing every level I could. Really a fun game, and well worth trying. It really shows how good games don’t need to have fancy graphics and sound to be enjoyable. Well done!
I’ll probably try the winner of the team entries, Trip on the Funny Boat, later tonight.
The next PyWeek will start in 6 months.
Jonathan Ellis (of Spyce fame), presented on PyGame at the recent Utah Python User Group meeting:
I had a lot of fun preparing this. I’d never used PyGame before, but as a teenager I spent a lot of time in the same space. (Anyone remember YakIcons?) So the general concepts were familiar to me, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good a job PyGame did at making things easy for me.
His presentation slides (pdf) and sample game framework are online.
Quoth Richard Jones:
The second PyWeek game programming challenge finished this morning. I’m stoked with the results from this challenge - 33 games were submitted in the end for judging (up 7 on last year) and the overall quality and variety in the games is quite astonishing.
Judging will take place over the next two weeks. And it sounds like PyWeek 3 will take place in six months from now!
Voting is over, and the official theme for PyWeek 2 is “It runs on steam!”. So the challenge has now officially started will conclude at exactly 00:00 UTC 2006-04-02.
There are lots of diary entries available if you want to follow along with the action. I’ve noticed that some people already have concept sketches up.
Best of luck to everyone who is competing!
In my ongoing quest for interesting MUDs built using Python, I came across MOOP (MUD, Object-Oriented, Pythonic):
Users connect to the server via TCP/IP, and can interact with other users in a fashion similar to any network MUD-type game. But the neat thing about a MOO is that all the coding which makes gadgets and gizmos and ordinary objects work is right there, available to the remote users … it is written entirely in Python, and all the code which makes the objects work is (of course) Python as well.
Sounds good. I’m definitely going to try that one this week.
Here are the theme choices that are currently being voted on for PyWeek 2:
Heh! The challenge begins on March 26.
As I mentioned the other day, I somehow went straight from BBS door games to IRC/web, skipping right over the whole MUD/MOO/MUSH phenomenon. That’s unfortunate. So I’ve been looking into MUDs lately, particularly how to build them using Python as the language of choice…
I loaded PyOgre on my Windows box tonight to try out the demo. PyOgre is a Python binding for OGRE:
OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++… The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.
So with PyOgre, you can use Python rather than coding in C++.
The installation wasn’t too bad. I loaded the main installer and unzipped the media files for the demos. I did have some slight trouble with some DLLs. I needed MSVCR80.DLL and d3dx9_27.dll. The former is included in the vcredist_x86 package. That latter I ended up downloading from DLL-files.com. After that everything seemed to work fine.
Doing any actual 3D programming with OGRE is a little beyond my skill level at this point. But the demos are really cool. Worth checking out.
The second part of the Creating a Game in Python Using PyGame tutorial is up at Learning Python. This one covers creating game levels, specifically a Pac Man clone.
It’s never too early to start gearing up for PyWeek 3!
You are currently browsing the archives for the Games category.
