I'm pleased to announce the 0.8 alpha release of Lepton, a high-performance, pluggable particle engine and API for Python. It is designed for creating graphical special effects for games or other visual applications. The engine is designed to be very flexible and does not rely on any other libraries directly. You can use it either with OpenGL (via pyglet, PyOpenGL, wxPython, etc), or with pygame by selecting the appropriate renderer. Examples are provided using pyglet and pygame. Although this is an alpha release, I think it is stable enough to use, and I encourage you to give it a try. The project page is here: http://code.google.com/p/py-lepton/ You can also get it via pypi here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lepton/ This release contains no new major functionality, but it has some important bug fixes and performance optimizations. I thought I would release these enhancements now rather than delay them by unrelated feature work. Changes in 0.8a include: - Fixed accuracy of bounce controller so that particles are much less likely to escape from a container domain. (Thanks to dugres for reporting the bug) - Fixed bug in Sphere.intersect() where it would return bogus vectors such as (nan,nan,nan) for stationary particles in some instances. This allowed an improvement to the bouncy example to further prevent errant particles. - Collector controller ported to C - Bounce controller ported to C - Add 2D splode example to demonstrate how to use lepton with the default pyglet OpenGL projection. - Allow basic attribute access for the C controllers from Python (More work is needed here for more complex attributes, like vectors) If you have questions or comments or would like to contribute, you can join the google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/py-lepton-users Enjoy. -Casey