News

pgreloaded (Pygame2) is an ongoing rewrite of the Pygame multimedia and game framework. As Pygame, it's purpose is to make writing multimedia applications, such as games, with Python as easy as possible, while providing the developer a reliable and extensible programming interface. It features a modular and loosely coupled package and module layout and access to the most features of the libraries it wraps.

pgreloaded can be installed side-by-side with Pygame as it uses a different package namespace and thus will not cause any conflicts with another Pygame installation.

The source and documentation packages as well as prebuilt Win32 installers are available from http://code.google.com/p/pygame/downloads/list

This is an alpha release for testing purposes and not meant to be run in production environments. pgreloaded is not backwards compatible with pygame - and work on pygame is still continuing.

pgreloaded (Pygame2) is an ongoing rewrite of the Pygame multimedia and game framework. As Pygame, it's purpose is to make writing multimedia applications, such as games, with Python as easy as possible, while providing the developer a reliable and extensible programming interface. It features a modular and loosely coupled package and module layout and access to the most features of the libraries it wraps.

pgreloaded can be installed side-by-side with Pygame as it uses a different package namespace and thus will not cause any conflicts with another Pygame installation.

The source and documentation packages as well as prebuilt Win32 installers are available from http://code.google.com/p/pygame/downloads/list

This is an alpha release for testing purposes and not meant to be run in production environments.

It was an amazing selection process this year and we received a lot of proposals and applications. Thanks a lot to all of you who applied! In the end, we received 3 slots from the PSF and now have three paid students working on their proposals during the GSoC.

• Tyler Laing will improve the movie support in pygame, by adding an ffmpeg-based module (blog).

• Vicent Marti will improve font handling using the freetype library (blog).

• Werner Laurensse will improve the new camera module and add MacOS X support for it (blog).

Besides that several applicants volunteered to work on their proposals even though they were not chosen. This was far ahead of our expectations and the prospected outcome of this year's summer will give pygame a major push forward.

• Enhance International Input Support for Mac OS X
• International Input (X11)
• Automated Testing Suite for SDL
• Playstation3 Port

The yearly Google Summer of Code is about to start and pygame wants to participate again this year.

We still have a lot of projects to do, so if you are a student and interested in working on and with pygame, talk to us on the . If none of the various projects matches your interest, but you have some outstanding idea on how to improve pygame, just discuss that with us and let's see how we can get it done together.

If you need any sort of help, or just want to shoot the breeze, you can most anytime find people in the pygame IRC channel.

EuroPython 2009 is an independent, community-run, community-controlled and not-for-profit conference dedicated to the Python programming language, Python applications, toolkits and frameworks. It also features social events and a chance to meet fellow Python users. It is organised by members of Python User Groups all over Europe.

Last Year, EuroPython 2008 was attended by over 200 delegates and featured around 50 talks and tutorials, as well as a conference dinner.

EuroPython 2009 will be taking place in Birmingham City Centre (UK) from the 28th June to 3rd July 2009. The pycon uk organisers have joined with the europython organisers to put on this conference -- so it has the potential to be the best europython conference yet.

They are after Talks, Tutorials and Other events... maybe you could propose a game jam, or a demo place for showing off your projects.

Submission deadline: April 5th, 2009 (but the sooner the better!)

Full details on submissions here: http://www.europython.eu/talks/cfp/. More details about euro python here: http://www.europython.eu/

Hey there sports fans,

Ludum Dare #13 is coming soon. December 5th-7th weekend. You know the drill.

Ludum Dare is a regular community driven game development competition. The goal is, given a theme and 48 hours, to develop a game from scratch. Ludum Dare aims to encourage game design experimentation, and provide a platform to develop and practice rapid game prototyping.

You can start suggesting themes now, with voting to start by the end of the month(December 1st 2008). http://ludumdare.com/wiki/start

www.ludumdare.com - the super awesome website, refresh hourly
irc://irc.afternet.org/ludumdare #ludumdare - the compo IRC channel, waste your time here
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ - the compo blog, be sure to sign up here
http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/ - the compo wiki, submit themes & read rules here
http://www.ludumdare.com/planet/ - the compo planet, read about our exciting lives here

• physics module
• Camera module
• testing improvements

• Force Feedback for SDL by Edgar Simo, mentored by Ryan C. Gordon
  - This was successfully implemented for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. See include/SDL_haptic.h for details on the API.
• Audio Ideas - Resampling and Pitch Shifting by Aaron Wishnick, mentored by Ryan C. Gordon
  - Resampling is fully implemented and pitch shifting is still in progress.
• Bring SDL to iPhone and iPod Touch by Holmes Futrell, mentored by Sam Lantinga
  - This was fully implemented, however due to Apple's NDA the snapshot only includes the OpenGL ES video driver. We are in discussion with Apple now.
• Port SDL 1.3 to the Nintendo DS, add touch input API by Darren Alton, mentored by Sam Lantinga
  - This was fully implemented, make -f Makefile.ds
• Refresh pointing device support by Szymon Wilczek, mentored by Ryan C. Gordon
  - Support for multiple mice and Wacom tablets was implemented for Linux and Windows. Wiki is available: http://wilku.ravenlord.ws/doku.php?id=start

Join other python people(programmers, not the english comedians) in making a game from scratch (unless you've released a library after a previous competition). You need to use only python(so there's no competition from those pesky C, C++, C# or flash programmers). You can join as a team, or as a solo entrant. So if you've got a few gfx/sfx/writer arty friends you can ask them to join your team. You're allowed to use freely available graphics and sound if you have no gfx/sfx skills or friends. Or maybe you could have a team with 5 pure programmers.

You can register, and vote for a theme now!

The dates of this challenge are are 00:00 UTC 2008-09-07 to 00:00 UTC 2008-09-14.

It's super fun and inspirational. Also you're guaranteed to finish... since you are automatically finished at the end of a week!

Stick a fork in it, it's baked... nice and toasty. Pygame 1.8.1 is now available for download.

Many bug fixes and improvements, including:

• BLEND_RGBA_* blitters and blenders to go with the BLEND_RGB_* blend modes.
• documentation updates (mainly for new sprite classes released in 1.8.0)
• sound fixes, and streaming some music from file like objects
• image saving fixes
• greatly expanded tests
• Pixelarray, and surfarray updates and fixes.
• Enhanced Color class, reimplemented in C for speed.
• New Windows and Mac binary installers.