New SolarWolf, 1.5

[Pete Shinners]

Peter Strempel wrote:
> I suppose a significant amount of the low-level graphics stuff happens
> inside the SDL C libraries, which should help performance. But I guess I am
> not the person to lecture you about Pygame architecture. :)

You are correct here. All the graphics and sound routines happen inside SDL. 
Pygame does offer the ability to map image pixel data inside Numeric arrays, 
which does allow for more realtime graphics effects, like the classic 
'flame', blurs, fades, etc.

Still, pygame itself is fairly low level when you get the game programming 
parts. It is not a big framework or "canvas" type application. Your python 
code must do all the work of managing and communicating game objects.


> I noticed the Linux binary installer bundles Python. This annoyed me two
> days ago, but right yesterday I got complains from a user of one of my
> projects which is linked to Python 2.3 (and expecting this on the endusers
> box) who is running Fedora which still has Python 2.2. I think I see your
> point. Deployment on Linux sucks...

Hard to get around the Python in the packaging. If it's any consolation, 
this is how all the .EXE versions of python programs work too. My main goal 
of the linux binary was so it could run on computers at work, which are an 
ancient Redhat release. Fortunately the included Python is very transparent, 
so you only know it's there if you start digging in.