[Edu-sig] Pygame article

[Burley, Brent]

I just came across this O'Reilly article about Pygame, the Python Game
library, http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/12/20/pygame.html.  It
gives an overview and a short example of moving a sprite around the
screen with the arrow keys.

The article also mentions "Severance, Blade of Darkness", a recently
released commercial game from Codemasters, which includes an embedded
python interpreter, http://www.codemasters.com/severance/front.htm.  In
fact, a python console can be launched from the game by giving a
"-console" command line argument.  It's been speculated on the net that
as much as 90% of the game has been coded in python and it's also been
reported that much of the source is included with the game as '.py'
files (nearly half a million lines on one report).

A personal testimonial:
My nephew is a high school senior and has been programming with pygame
for a few months.  He's been learning python on his own (with much
success I might add) on my suggestion as his C++ courses at school have
been moving too slow for him to be able to do anything "interesting". 
He was just telling me that after a year and a half they are finally
getting to "classes" in C++ and he was surprised at how much ahead of
the game he was having been exposed to python classes with pygame.

It's also worth noting that pygame is useful for projects other than
games.  There's a handful of apps on the pygame site,
http://www.pygame.org including the San Diego Zoo Panda Cam and even a
full-featured UI toolkit.

	Brent