About the Name

I've had a couple of inquiries about the "opioid" in the framework name, so I just wanted to make it clear that it is not meant to be a pro-drugs statement or anything like that. It's a bit of an unfortunate choice from a marketing perspective, but the link to gaming in this case is that endorphin is a natural opioid (and Endorphin2D would've been a clumsy name for a framework).

(EDIT: actually, the wikipedia link doesn't currently explain the connection all that well, since it doesn't mention the supposed connection between endorphins and feelings of pleasure and euphoria.)

Opioid2D alpha 6 patch 1

There were a couple of bugs in the alpha 6 release (thanks to everyone who reported them!), so I've released a new patched version. You can get it from the usual download page.

Opioid2D alpha 6 release

I've released the 6th alpha of Opioid2D. It's available from the Opioid2D download page and the list of changes can be viewed here.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough time for the snippets library yet, so that has to wait for alpha 7.

I'm rather happy with Opioid2D feature-wise so far, so the next couple of weeks will be spent on cleaning up and optimizing the internals before another feature push.

SVN and TRAC back online

The server move is finally finished and everything seems to work fine so far, so the TRAC can once again be found at http://trac.opioid-interactive.com/opi2d and SVN checkouts are available from svn://svn.opioid-interative.com/shang/opi2d/trunk

I've finished committing all code changes made during the downtime to SVN, and I'll go through the wiki and update it accordingly in the following few days. After I get everything cleaned up, O2D alpha 6 will be right around the corner.

Opioid2D Code Snippets Library

Another thing I'm starting from alpha 6 onwards, is to compile a collection of useful example snippets, that show the idiomatic way to do certain things in Opioid2D. They will be smaller than actual example games, but a bit larger and better written than the short test scripts in the distribution so far: things like HealthMeter, ParallaxScrolling, ObjectPicking etc. The idea is that you can study those snippets and paste them into your own code when learning O2D. They should give a better starting point until I can finalize all documentation.

So, if you have any suggestions for useful snippets you'd like to see, please list them in comments for this entry.

Upcoming API Changes

I've started cleaning up the APIs a bit, revising stuff that doesn't feel quite right in actual use. The biggest change is in method naming conventions. For some reason, it originally felt like a good idea to capitalize class methods and methods on singleton objects differently (using CapWords), but this hasn't really felt Pythonic when using the framework, so I'm going to change everything to lowercase_words now that I still can. The old naming convention will still work in alpha 6, but it prints out a deprecation warning as a reminder.

Other changes that I'm currently evaluating include moving sprite rect attributes to the sprite object itself, so that you use e.g. sprite.left instead of sprite.rect.left and so on. The particle emitter API is another part that feels somehow off, so expect at least small changes there.

I'm trying to get all backward incompatible changes out of the way by alpha 7, so that APIs in alpha 8 and onwards should stay stable and compatible.