There's an updated version of Pygame, the long established Python game development wrapper. It was last updated more than seven years ago so news of version 1.9.2 marks the end of a long wait.

Pygame is a Python wrapper module for the SDL multimedia library that you can use to create games in Python. The library contains Python functions and classes that you can use to access SDL’s support for playing cdroms, audio and video output, and keyboard, mouse and joystick input.

Pygame is highly portable, and has been downloaded millions of times. Its wiki describes it as having 'silliness built in' with more silliness being added every 3.1415 seconds. Another advantage of Pygame is that it doesn't require OpenGL. It can use it, but can equally use Directx, Windib, X11, linux frame buffer, and many other different backends... including an ASCII art back end. It's often used when teaching Python, and it has a lot of enthusiastic users.

The updated version follows on from a sprint (a Python hackathon) at EuroPython back in June. One of the main things holding back the release of the new release (1.9.2) was the lack of a working version of binary wheels for Linux, so that pip install would work on Linux. Wheels are Pythons package format. A wheel is is a ZIP-format archive with a specially formatted file name that can be installed by simply unpacking into site-packages with the standard 'unzip' tool. The sprint saw the binary wheels for Linux finished, so that there are now binary wheels for all the major platforms. including Windows.

Those of you of a more serious disposition might want to know that a release candidate of Python 3.6.0 is now available - you can check out the new features in our recent coverage of the beta and further new features. This will be the next major release of Python, and code for it is now frozen.

More Information

Pygame Overview

Python 3.6 Release Candidate

Related Articles

Python 3.6.0 Beta 1

//No Comment - Python 3.6

Kivy 1.9 Released  

Python 3.5 Released

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info