[summerofcode] Project proposal:

[Patrick Mullen]

 Hello fellow pythonistas! This seems like a great program that will 
hopefully infuse new life into a lot of the open source community, and it's 
wonderful that python is getting involved. At first I thought that I could 
only choose off of the idea list on the wiki, in which case the project I 
was going to go for would be the anygui one. While wxPython is now mostly 
considered the de facto standard, it seems a little big to be included as 
the standard gui for python. I would like to see a nice, featured, light, 
gui to replace tk, which is pretty shabby in my opinion. But that's quite a 
large undertaking. I would want to make it expandable, so that the same code 
can be used without installing an external toolkit, and then when you 
install gtk or wx it could use that. For the summer of code I think getting 
a reference implementation using sdl/opengl would be good. 

My other idea is to implement a 2d game engine layer on top of pygame. I've 
been working on such a thing for roughly a year, but it's not very usable at 
the moment. I have sprites, buggy animation, smooth scrolling, basic 
collision detection, verrry buggy physics, and tilemap support. My goal is 
to end up with a nice pythonic 2d engine that makes it easy to make any 
oldschool 2d game, from rpgs to platformers. You can create new classes 
which subclass the defaults, like characters, bullets, collision objects, to 
define functionality to fit the game. For instance, if you need a scripted 
event to occur when a player walks on a tile, you can subclass the tile 
class and add a def playerEnter() function which runs the event. Some of the 
scripting capabilities are already available, but there is a lot missing, 
and a lot of bugs. Many of the main systems, like collisions, pretty much 
need a complete rewrite. My goal for the summerofcode would be to get the 
engine up to a level where it can handle say, a simple mario-style 
platformer.

I am more interested in my game engine, because I would like to see more 
great games written in python; but pygame is so low level the majority of 
things we see made with it are very simple. It shouldn't be that hard to 
create games that are as good as seen on the snes, especially when we have 
the power of python in our hands!

Which one do you guys think I should work on, and do you think I have a 
chance of being accepted? I have a feeling that the game project might be 
looked down upon. If I do take on the gui, does anyone have any input on how 
I should go about it? The way I want to do it is to use opengl to draw the 
widgets, falling back on sdl if opengl isn't available. However, neither 
pyopengl nor sdl are included in the standard library. Is there something 
else I should use for drawing? Should I write the opengl widgets in c and 
make it a c module? Or is this all a waste of time - i.e. tk is going to 
stay as the default gui.

Cheers!
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