Pygame 2.0

Circa 2007 I started messing with pygame. Just this week I dug up some of my old code and typed `python main.py` thinking, no way this&#x27;ll work. But it did.<p>The first feature on the Pygame 2 page is &quot;Backward compatibility&quot;. Pygame&#x27;s been way behind the times and I&#x27;m excited to see it getting some attention. But major kudos to the team for maintaining that priority.

Great news! There were 5+ years during which I warned people away from Pygame. First there was no official release with Python 3 support in sight. Once that happened, I was disappointed that it still used the old SDL, which was utterly obsolete by then.<p>The last area I&#x27;d like to see improved is the documentation. But the list of stuff that did get done over the last couple of years looks fantastic. Thanks to all the contributors; I&#x27;m looking forward to kicking 2.0&#x27;s .whls.

I self learned pygame in high school, 15 years later I’m still using it for mapping and rendering - I probably shouldn’t, but I find the library just so damn intuitive.<p>Congrats To the pygame team, and thank you for being the core tool which truly taught my objective code, and many UI design concepts (:

As coincidences go, just the day before yesterday I looked into pygame and came across this Quora question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Is-Pygame-fast-enough-for-modern-game-development" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Is-Pygame-fast-enough-for-modern-game-...</a><p>The sentiment seems to be that it&#x27;s not suitable for more than small toy games -- which in itself would still be interesting. I mean, it&#x27;s clear that professional AAA studios are not the core target group.<p>But has anyone here on HN additional hands-on experience that would support or reject the above assessment?

Pygame sounds cool. All I want to know is what platforms does it support, suprised they dont list that anywhere easy to find.<p>This blog based project home page obscures the relevant in favor of the recent.<p>Found the relevance on the About page.<p>&quot;Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system.&quot;<p>Would appreciate a list but Ok.<p>Oh snap here we go:<p>&quot;Truly portable. Supports Linux (pygame comes with most main stream linux distributions), Windows (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 64-bit Windows, etc), Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD&#x2F;OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF&#x2F;Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS and OS&#x2F;2, but these are not officially supported. You can use it on hand held devices, game consoles and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer.&quot;<p>Wonder if it supports an HTML player?

It&#x27;s really nice to see how type hints are spreading. I&#x27;ve been surprised how natural my adoption of them has been.

I think Python Arcade (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pythonarcade&#x2F;arcade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pythonarcade&#x2F;arcade</a>) is&#x2F;was a bit more active, right?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arcade.academy&#x2F;pygame_comparison.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arcade.academy&#x2F;pygame_comparison.html</a><p>When I checked PyGame, that was ages ago, and it looked a lot like a (higher-level) SDL wrapper to me, but more Pythonic. Although, coming from C++ and having used SDL before, I decided to use a more direct SDL wrapper instead. So I created my own simple ctypes-based wrapper (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertz&#x2F;PySDL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertz&#x2F;PySDL</a>). But this is not really updated, and there are newer ones (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marcusva&#x2F;py-sdl2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marcusva&#x2F;py-sdl2</a>).<p>Anyway, I don&#x27;t want to say these are better. It&#x27;s great that PyGame is still active (again).<p>It&#x27;s great to have such simple libraries to write games. Also for educational purpose, or just for fun. E.g. I wrote this (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertz&#x2F;PyOverheadGame" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertz&#x2F;PyOverheadGame</a>).

Nice! The first real game I ever made was with pygame :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;samertm&#x2F;snake-python" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;samertm&#x2F;snake-python</a>

I&#x27;ve written a lot of stuff in pygame on the pi.<p>The major issue I ran into was no hardware acceleration, so performance came from (software) blits of only the updated part of the screen and similar techniques.<p>But I found it very fun to program in an environment with integrated graphics and sound and fonts and video and input devices and a event loop with timer ticks.<p>A lot of linux folks are thinking x vs wayland, but I&#x27;ll bet if we replaced everything with an integrated environment that had everything necessary to support a game, we would have much better linux user interfaces.

I put together a halloween display using a Kinect and pygame for my front yard (very quickly hacked together by the way):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;erahhal&#x2F;kinect-halloween-skeleton" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;erahhal&#x2F;kinect-halloween-skeleton</a><p>Pygame is nice and easy to use, though I think I&#x27;d go with something else next time, as it doesn&#x27;t support multiple monitors or OpenGL very well. I see OpenGL stuff at the top of the Pygame 2.0 change list so maybe worth checking out.

Has anyone tested the android support?<p>It could be an interesting tool for prototypes.

Fantastic! Feels like it&#x27;s been a dead project for so long, it&#x27;s good to see it&#x27;s properly back and fully modernized.

Pygame is great, I&#x27;ve used it for a one day gamejam and despite not being familiar with it, i was up and running quickly.

Blast from the past. I created a simple UI system for pygame a long time ago. It would be fun to hack on that again. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fictorial&#x2F;pygameui" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fictorial&#x2F;pygameui</a>

Wow. Pygame was one of my first forays into game development. I&#x27;m emotional now.

When I first learned Python (2.5, so old!), pygame was my introduction to programming GUIs, sounds, and games. I learned a lot about Python using pygame. I am surprised to see it&#x27;s still going fairly strong!

Wow, this is still being worked on? Amazing, keep up the good work!

Pygame was one of my initial drivers for learning Python then using Linux and become a professional programmer. Congratulations!

Any good commercial games released?

Any uses of it for things that aren&#x27;t games?

My wishlist:<p>* Integration with numpy&#x2F;scipy&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;etc.<p>* Integration with Python Mode for Processing<p>* Integration with either the Arduino or the Micro:bit ecosystem<p>* Integration with Pygame Zero (so there are smooth, documented ways to transition -- low floor&#x2F;high ceiling, rather than two modes of working)<p>* Eventually, integration and wrapping of OpenCV<p>In other words, Pygame would benefit from integrating with the broader ecosystem one might wish to use to teach kids to code. Writing games involves a lot of math, image processing, and similar, and 2020 computers are fast enough kids can do that without writing optimized assembly. It&#x27;s nice if games can be physically embedded (Arduino&#x2F;Micro:bit).<p>Right now, there&#x27;s a collection of projects, but they don&#x27;t play well together. The level of contortions one must go through to move a sprite from being a numpy array to an image in whatever library, to an image in another library, is well beyond what most kids (or even teachers) can handle.