Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Hello Elinor, You might like to look at the book Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python It's available from Amazon as a paper book, but you can look at the whole thing on-line first. Chapters 17-20 are on pygame, with the others on more basic topics. See http://inventwithpython.com/chapters/ Russell On 20 October 2011 21:00, Elinor Madigan em...@psu.edu wrote: Hello, I am currently teaching a course in Python at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus. My students are experimenting with Pygames and they are interested in giving back to the Pygames community. As my students have a variety of programming abilities, I am not sure they could provide any complex code. With that being said, would it be beneficial to the community if they created some basic tutorials for you and if so, do you have any suggestions on possible topics? Regards, Elinor Madigan -- Elinor M. Madigan, PhD, PMP Program Coordinator Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus 200 University Dr. Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972 Phone: 570-385-6076 email: em...@psu.edu
Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Hi, Elinor. There may be an opportunity to provide answers to the questions frequently asked on IRC channel #pygame. Tutorials do exist, and people use them. More than a few pygame neophytes often come to the channel looking for a fast track to pygame mastery. They don't want to read the API docs, articles, nor look for examples outside the few tutorials available on pygame.org. The questions' typical preamble: I'm looking at Punch the Monkey, but I can't figure out how to... Alas, even the venerable Punch the Monkey tutorial is not simple enough in some circumstances. It is clear that there will always be an influx of people who would appreciate a progressive collection of focus tutorials, each small enough to digest with ease. A very useful feature would be references (URL or module.Class.component) to the key pygame features they demonstrate, linking the practical example to its API documentation. Here are some of the questions I remember. The ones with oo (two o's) are significantly more advanced than Punch the Monkey. o When I render my FPS in a font, it keeps overwriting itself and I can't read it. (simple/proper game loop setup) o How do I manipulate Rect objects? (in all the various ways) oo How do I use sprite.Group, et al? (progression, simple to complex usage) o How do I test collisions? (this seems to be arcane to neophytes, though the sprite.Group and Rect classes seem pretty straightforward) oo How do I handle collisions? (stop, rebound, slide along edges) oo How can I detect collisions between different shapes? (sprite.Group supports custom collided callbacks; and there are other ways that don't involve pygame) oo How can I detect pixel-perfect collision? (various handling involving non-axis aligned math a bonus) oo How can I detect collisions for bullet or line-of-sight scenarios? o After a while my game window says Not Responding. (basic event housekeeping) oo How can I make parts of my game process pygame events differently (contextually)? oo I want an intro, a menu, a game loop, a high score, a credits... How do I connect all these without having one monolithic, spaghetti tangle Game class? oo How can I tint my surfaces, or overlay effects such as patterns? oo My game world is bigger than the screen. How do I manage the world and a camera to update and draw only the visible parts of the world? (many libraries do this, but they are not tutorials; people most often seek entry to this concept so they can learn by writing their own library) #pygame denizens can probably come up with many more. Gumm
Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
I'm a big fan of using the game Simon as a vehicle to learn a programming language.
Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
2011/10/20 Elinor Madigan em...@psu.edu: Hello, I am currently teaching a course in Python at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus. My students are experimenting with Pygames and they are interested in giving back to the Pygames community. As my students have a variety of programming abilities, I am not sure they could provide any complex code. With that being said, would it be beneficial to the community if they created some basic tutorials for you and if so, do you have any suggestions on possible topics? I'm using python and pygame with my students too. There are other python and pygame experiences, but I like this model with C# and XNA: https://www.facultyresourcecenter.com/curriculum/pfv.aspx?Id=8856c1=en-usc2=0Login= They use a problem-solution methodology based on starter kits, where studens have to detect and change some parts of code. Maybe we can prepare a similar path with pygame. I use this introduction to C# in my classes too, giving it 40 hours more or less. Regards, -- luismiguel Regards, Elinor Madigan -- Elinor M. Madigan, PhD, PMP Program Coordinator Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus 200 University Dr. Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972 Phone: 570-385-6076 email: em...@psu.edu
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Besides the programming aspects, one of the great things is that it teaches about the sciences as well. Even the most trivial games require use of basic physics concepts like vector math and the laws of motion, and require mathematical integration for the time stepping. Game programming is a great educational vehicle for lots of reasons. On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:54 AM, Ian Mallett geometr...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I find simple games are helpful in teaching students. With practice, one can hack up a very simple game in Python/PyGame in a matter of a few minutes. At the end, people have a product to show for it. I often find students have a good time making games too, because it's surprisingly open-ended. It also works at many levels of programming expertise, because games can vary in complexity. Ian
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Joe Ranalli jrana...@gmail.com wrote: Besides the programming aspects, one of the great things is that it teaches about the sciences as well. Even the most trivial games require use of basic physics concepts like vector math and the laws of motion, and require mathematical integration for the time stepping. Game programming is a great educational vehicle for lots of reasons. Yeah, and music programming is fun too. As well, text adventures - with natural language processing - can teach a lot about language. - Using wordnet API to construct a text adventure. cu.
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 4:48 AM, René Dudfield ren...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, and music programming is fun too. As well, text adventures - with natural language processing - can teach a lot about language. Upon René's mention of text it occurs to me that pygame sports an international community, but I don't often see internationalization in our games. I'm sure I could figure it out if I took the time, but if there were an simple, extensible module (a la pygame.org/cookbook) and a tool for managing it we might see more of that. We may not see many translations, but the capabilities would be there if someone wanted to contribute a translation to an existing game. Gumm
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Hi, A major roadblock to internationalization was the limit (if not non existant) Unicode support in the pygame.font module. For Pygame 1.9.2 the Font module has been updated to fully handle UCS-2 (SDL_ttf does not support UTF-16 or UTF-32, unfortunately). The upcoming pygame.freetype module has bypasses the restrictions imposed by SDL_ttf by using the freetype2 library directly. It has full UTF-32 support. Lenard Lindstrom On Oct 21, 2011, stabbingfinger stabbingfin...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 4:48 AM, Ren Dudfield ren...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, and music programming is fun too. As well, text adventures - with natural language processing - can teach a lot about language. Upon Ren's mention of text it occurs to me that pygame sports an international community, but I don't often see internationalization in our games. I'm sure I could figure it out if I took the time, but if there were an simple, extensible module (a la pygame.org/cookbook) and a tool for managing it we might see more of that. We may not see many translations, but the capabilities would be there if someone wanted to contribute a translation to an existing game. Gumm
Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Hello, that sounds great! I'll have a think about some fun topics... hrmm. - How to 'tint' an image with green/blue/red. - Timing for input. eg, actions that happen if you press a key combination fast enough. On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Elinor Madigan em...@psu.edu wrote: Hello, I am currently teaching a course in Python at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus. My students are experimenting with Pygames and they are interested in giving back to the Pygames community. As my students have a variety of programming abilities, I am not sure they could provide any complex code. With that being said, would it be beneficial to the community if they created some basic tutorials for you and if so, do you have any suggestions on possible topics? Regards, Elinor Madigan -- Elinor M. Madigan, PhD, PMP Program Coordinator Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus 200 University Dr. Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972 Phone: 570-385-6076 email: em...@psu.edu
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Another possibility is add more demo programs, or improve on existing ones. An audio file player would a simple start. Maybe Fonty could be extended to show sizing and some UTF-16 characters (an appropriate font file would have to be included in the data). Something for the pygame.math module? Of course, if the students are not adverse to drudgery, there is always the unit tests ;-). Lenard Lindstrom On Oct 20, 2011, Ren Dudfield ren...@gmail.com wrote: Hello,that sounds great! I'll have a think about some fun topics... hrmm.- How to 'tint' an image with green/blue/red.- Timing for input. eg, actions that happen if you press a key combination fast enough. On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Elinor Madigan em...@psu.edu wrote: Hello, I am currently teaching a course in Python at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus. My students are experimenting with Pygames and they are interested in giving back to the Pygames community. As my students have a variety of programming abilities, I am not sure they could provide any complex code. With that being said, would it be beneficial to the community if they created some basic tutorials for you and if so, do you have any suggestions on possible topics? Regards, Elinor Madigan -- Elinor M. Madigan, PhD, PMP Program Coordinator Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus 200 University Dr. Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972 Phone: 570-385-6076 email: em...@psu.edu
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Absolutely wonderful to hear that Pygame is being used in an educational environment :) On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Lenard Lindstrom le...@telus.net wrote: Another possibility is add more demo programs, or improve on existing ones. An audio file player would a simple start. Maybe Fonty could be extended to show sizing and some UTF-16 characters (an appropriate font file would have to be included in the data). Something for the pygame.math module? Of course, if the students are not adverse to drudgery, there is always the unit tests ;-). Lenard Lindstrom On Oct 20, 2011, *René Dudfield* ren...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, that sounds great! I'll have a think about some fun topics... hrmm. - How to 'tint' an image with green/blue/red. - Timing for input. eg, actions that happen if you press a key combination fast enough. On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Elinor Madigan em...@psu.edu wrote: Hello, I am currently teaching a course in Python at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus. My students are experimenting with Pygames and they are interested in giving back to the Pygames community. As my students have a variety of programming abilities, I am not sure they could provide any complex code. With that being said, would it be beneficial to the community if they created some basic tutorials for you and if so, do you have any suggestions on possible topics? Regards, Elinor Madigan -- Elinor M. Madigan, PhD, PMP Program Coordinator Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus 200 University Dr. Schuylkill Haven, PA 17972 Phone: 570-385-6076 email: em...@psu.edu -- Andrew Ulysses Baker failrate
Re: Re: [pygame] Students Interested in Pygames Community
Hi, I find simple games are helpful in teaching students. With practice, one can hack up a very simple game in Python/PyGame in a matter of a few minutes. At the end, people have a product to show for it. I often find students have a good time making games too, because it's surprisingly open-ended. It also works at many levels of programming expertise, because games can vary in complexity. Ian
