[summerofcode] Project proposal:

[Brett C.]

Patrick Mullen wrote:
>    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. 
>   

This is obviously my personal opinion and not the PSF's or python-dev, but I
would not count on Tkinter being replaced any time soon.  Python 3000 might see
a GUI change, but who knows.

But don't let that discourage you!  Just because something might not go into
the stdlib does not make it useless!  As long as the community would find it
useful that is what counts.

>    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.
> 

That sounds like a fine idea.  I doubt the PSF is going to reject an idea just
because it is for games and not some module to help facilitate coding.

If Google doesn't prevent you from making multiple proposals (don't they let
you make multiple proposals but only have one accepted?) I would propose both.

-Brett