Vienna, 17. Feb. 2010: The first public reading directly from The Python Game Book took place during my talk about programming with Pygame at a meeting of the PYUGAT (Python User Group Austria) in Vienna‘s famous hackerspace, the Metalab.
My speech was more about practical programming than about The Python Game Book itself, and i concentrated on part2: 2D programming with pygame.
Thanks to the new download-code-direct-from-wiki-feature of Dokuwiki my workload for updating code snippets dropped dramatically…
The little “catch the thief” game (only surfaces, no pygame sprites) showed ugly line artefacts, maybe because my cleanrect function is buggy.
The spritedemo is no finished game yet but works fine. My students are currently busy inventing game ideas for the sprite demo.
Results so far:
- Bring down the frame rate by creating 1.000.000 sprites
- Find one marked sprite (babytux) out of hundreds..
I look forward to see my students working with The Python Game Book at the Austria Game Jam next weekend: A meeting where artists and coders come together to build teams and create a game in 48 hours. The Austria Game Jam is part of the global game jam.
As speed counts more than perfection at game jams, i have hope to see the theory proofed that Python (and pygame) is one of the fastest programming languages:
Not so much fast at raw computing speed (a interpreted language is usually slower then a compiled language) but fast at “from idea to result” speed.
More information at my blog post in German language.
Horst JENS
