ANNOUNCE: pygame 0.5

[Pete Shinners]

Pygame, Python Game Development.

Pygame 0.5 released on Jan 6th, 2001

Pygame homepage:  http://pygame.seul.org
SDL homepage:     http://www.libsdl.org
Maintainer:       Pete Shinners (pete at shinners.org)
(all urls at bottom of message)


Pygame is a set of python modules written to help create games in Python.
The package is wrapped around SDL and several of the SDL daughter libraries.
SDL is a cross-platform media library created by Lokigames. SDL is currently
used for many commercial and opensource game projects. This pygame binding
takes SDL's C interface and turns it into a more pythonic library with
objects, exceptions, and some python utility modules.

This version 0.5, (release about a month after the previous 0.4)
makes many bugfixes and a few small enhancements. At this point the
library api has settled into a solid state. The coming plans call
for a move to 1.0 within a couple of months. Now is a great time to
examine the project and send in feedback.


A tally list of pygame features (note, many are also SDL features);

    Cross platform, with multiple backends (x11, fbcon, svgalib, etc)
    Fullscreen or windowed accelerated graphics
    Image loading from popular formats; jpg, bmp, gif, png, etc
    Access image pixel data as Numeric Python arrays
    Blitting with colorkey and alpha support
    Multiple mixing sound channels
    Streaming music data as mp3, mod, wav, etc
    CDROM support with audio playback
    Joystick support
    Truetype font rendering, with antialiasing
    Support for multiple threads

The pygame package also comes with complete documentation, tutorials,
and many playable examples. The pygame mailing list has an active
list of users, which makes getting started much more accessable.

Pygame is distributed under the LGPL licese, which is the same
license used by many its dependencies. There are several types of
distributions for download; RPM, Precompiled Win32, and Source.