I can proudly report that 4 of my students of participated at the Austria Game Jam (and therefore at the global game jam). One project – called monkeydoner was submitted during 48 hours, consisting of 3 little games. All programmed with python / pygame using Ubuntu Linux.
One of the sub-games was inspired from an example out of the pythongamebook.
The Austria Game Jam helped me to see other programmers (some also using python/pygame) working with incredible speed and talent. I got valuable input for my pythongamebok.
Sadly i found no time to submit a game myself or become useful for the team i joined, because i was too busy helping out the team of my students.
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.
Good news: The dokuwiki mailing list says that the next dokuwiki version will have improved features for the code plugin.
This is good for The Python Game Book because i was never full happy with the existing code module. The new module will make downloading the displayed code more simple (for the author of the wiki book)
progress report:
I was a bit lazy the last month and still have to correct spelling errors and other errors on the existing pages of The Python Game Book. Meanwhile i started to code several new pygame examples, mostly simple 2 player – one screen games with sprites and static background.
Responding to critique from users of the german pythonforum i changed the layout of the code “line by line” discussion.
The old layout (a table with comments left and the code lines right) was very ugly at low screen resolutions (1024 width and less). New layout has code line and below the comments.
The bad news: i have not yet cleaned up several of the errors in part 1 (python). Also explaining text and code discussion for the first pygame examples are still missing except for the very first pygame example.
Unsolved problems: the open-office export works but make the line breaks differently than DokuWiki (big surprise). This is specially bad when quoting python code examples. I see no solution for this problem at the moment.
Unsolved problems: Internet explorer somehow messes up Dokuwiki’s code2 plugin. The code is visible, but the code window looks messy. I hope the DokuWiki guru’s come up with a solution, as i am neither capable nor willing to care for Internet Explorer users.
Here a screenshot of pygame code example 006: The little blue ball “moves” before the big brown ball (the background), using a dirty rect method.
Screenshot of pygame example 006.py from The Python Game Book
while www.pygamebook.com still works, i think www.pythongamebook.com will become the official url for my book.
Reasons: the book is more than just a book about pygame, and python is the one element important for all three major parts of the book: programming, 2D graphics and 3D graphics.
At the moment, the new url is only a simple forwarding so that the “real” url shows up in the browser:
http://www.spielend-programmieren.at/pythongamebook, hopefully not scaring readers away.
A better solution would be to replace the “www.spielend-programmieren.at” part with “www.pythongamebook.com” but beside a very costly solution i have not figured out how to do that.
got responses from a posting (requesting test readers) on a German Python Forum:
Got not much responses, but all responses were high-quality. Now i have time to apply the proposed changes into The Python Game Book. My secret dream that my test readers would do the work for me and simply apply the edits in the wiki did not come true (yet).
Most important: i get rid (again) of the line numbers in Python code.
Background: The Python programming language does not use line numbers, but in most computer books line numbers are necessary to explain code sinppets.
I found a dokuwiki-plugin that allowed client-controlled line number toggling. However, the plugin made the code look very ugly and i could not fix this ugliness.
Now i’m back to a less sophisticated plugin with only server-controlled line number toggling. But the code looks better readable. And thanks to a very detailed line-by-line discussion after each code sinppet, i hope to make the book readable without ever using line numbers at all.
Added some minor pages, the most recent is Why open-source and needs some proof-reading from an legal expert.
Also i noted that my provider forward the url WWW.PYGAMEBOOK.COM inside an invisible frameset to the “real” url, meaning that it was hard to use the wiki because the url – line in the browser never changed. I fixed that. As soon as you click a link in the wiki, the url – line in your browser should change to the “real” url http://www.spielend-programmieren.at/pythongamebook followed by an dokuwiki-specific string for the actual wikipage.
Posted by Horst JENS 
