Lepton particle engine 0.7a released

[Casey Duncan]

I'm pleased to announce the 0.7 alpha release of Lepton, a
high-performance, pluggable particle engine and API for Python. It is
designed for creating graphical special effects for games or other
visual applications. The engine is designed to be very flexible and
does not rely on any other libraries directly. You can use it either
with OpenGL (via pyglet, PyOpenGL, wxPython, etc), or with pygame by
selecting the appropriate renderer. Examples are provided using pyglet
and pygame. Although this is an alpha release, I think it is stable
enough to be useful, and I encourage you to give it a try.

The project page is here:

http://code.google.com/p/py-lepton/

You can also get it via pypi here:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lepton/

Changes in 0.7a include:

- Fader controller ported to C
- Added per-particle emitter and fireworks example
- Port Line and Plane domains to C
- Port Box domain to C, rename to AABox. deprecate domain.Box for reuse later
- Port Sphere domain to C, add support for inner and outer radius for
spherical shells
- Bounce controller gets separate bounce and friction parameters
- Improve lame pygame fill example to use new bounce features and be
less lame (2.5D, suhweet!)
- Implement particle proxy and vector object pools to reduce or
eliminate object allocation when iterating and traversing particles
from python
- Optimize particle group C typecheck function

If you have questions or comments or would like to contribute, you can
join the google group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/py-lepton-users

Enjoy.

-Casey