Live data from Hacker News

Pygame 2.0

github.com

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: Pygame 2.0

#11
post #8

As coincidences go, just the day before yesterday I looked into pygame and came across this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Is-Pygame-fast-enough-for-modern-game-... The sentiment seems to be that it's not suitable for more than small toy games -- which in itself would still be interesting. I mean, it's clear that professional AAA studios are not the core target group. But has anyone here on HN additional hands…

I built a game engine and some games on top of Python, way back in the day when I was still learning programming.

Pygame on its own really gives you none of the features that a proper game engine needs, such as support for animated sprites, a map loader, a camera system (in Pygame, everything is in screen coordinates, and you can't zoom in or out), a real physics engine, a particle system, tweening, and so on. And unfortunately, back then, because it was still running on top of SDL1, it used a software renderer, which made it very painful to implement these features as well. Features that require whole-screen updates, such as smoothly zooming in on a tilemap, were just impossible to implement in a way that would still give you 60fps. This may have improved with the switch to SDL2, but the fact that you have to handroll a lot of things has not.

I consider Pygame to be a good toy for beginners: it has relatively little complexity, while at the same time still feeling like an actual API and in principle gives you a foundation that really cool and fun things can be built on (unlike turtle or other things that are only toys). But if you're not looking to play, you're looking to make a game, it's obviously a wrong choice.

Re: Pygame 2.0

#12
post #9
post #8

As coincidences go, just the day before yesterday I looked into pygame and came across this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Is-Pygame-fast-enough-for-modern-game-... The sentiment seems to be that it's not suitable for more than small toy games -- which in itself would still be interesting. I mean, it's clear that professional AAA studios are not the core target group. But has anyone here on HN additional hands…

I've done a fair amount with Pygame. It's great for learning the fundamentals of 2D graphics and little toy games, it works well for writing simple programs to do things with image data, and I imagine you could use it to pretty easily get an OpenGL window to draw into. I would not recommend using Pygame to develop a serious game project. All of Pygame's provided functions use software rendering, so you won't be able…

Are you sure you're not talking about an older version of Pygame regarding the software rendering? I haven't used it but the very first bullet point in the list of changes of this release says:

> Support for Metal, Direct 3d, Vulkan, OpenGL 3.0+ in various profiles (core, compatibility, debug, robust, etc), OpenGL ES, and other modern hardware accelerated video APIs across many platforms.

Re: Pygame 2.0

#13
I self learned pygame in high school, 15 years later I’m still using it for mapping and rendering - I probably shouldn’t, but I find the library just so damn intuitive.

Congrats To the pygame team, and thank you for being the core tool which truly taught my objective code, and many UI design concepts (:

Re: Pygame 2.0

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a fair amount with Pygame. It's great for learning the fundamentals of 2D graphics and little toy games, it works well for writing simple programs to do things with image data, and I imagine you could use it to pretty easily get an OpenGL window to draw into. I would not recommend using Pygame to develop a serious game project. All of Pygame's provided functions use software rendering, so you won't be able…

Are you sure you're not talking about an older version of Pygame regarding the software rendering? I haven't used it but the very first bullet point in the list of changes of this release says: > Support for Metal, Direct 3d, Vulkan, OpenGL 3.0+ in various profiles (core, compatibility, debug, robust, etc), OpenGL ES, and other modern hardware accelerated video APIs across many platforms.

pygame team member here

There's an important caveat: We provide an API for the SDL2 render system, and some functionality for up-scaling pixel art games on the GPU, but existing pygame 1.x games won't magically become faster by running on PyGame 2.0. They will be a little faster, because we have new, optimised blitting and drawing routines. To make use of GPU-based rendering, you will need to use the new APIs.

Re: Pygame 2.0

#16
post #3

Nice! The first real game I ever made was with pygame :) https://github.com/samertm/snake-python

Made this in a few days (it is a tetris which starts shaking, rotating, inverting and solarizing the area as you pass levels)

https://github.com/nurettin/tedriz

I don't know if pygame is really easy or if I got pretty good at coding in python. Probably the former.

Re: Pygame 2.0

#20
post #4

Any good commercial games released?

This comes to mind: https://store.steampowered.com/app/951360

DaFluffyPotato also shares his Pygame work on Twitter, if you are interested in professional Pygame development his timeline may be worth checking *

* https://twitter.com/dafluffypotato?lang=en

Post reply on HN