January Update

Unfortunately I don't have much to tell regarding Opioid2D, even though it's been several months again. There have been small patches and adjustments since the last release, but most of my coding time has been spent on the game project I'm doing at work. The game is nearing its release deadline and the crunch is on, so I really haven't had that much energy for personal projects.

There are a couple of Opioi2D related things I've been thinking about, but haven't yet started implementing. The biggest is the rethinking of the node hierarchy system and sprite drawing order. The current design just isn't flexible enough in all use cases, and also isn't as efficient as it could be. Another important thing is the drawing system (lines, triangles, rects etc.) and how to tie that neatly into the action system and rest of Opioid2D. I also happened to come upon a really promising looking 2D physics library called Box2D, which would be a perfect fit for Opioi2D. I've browsed through the API, and I don't think it would be all that difficult to integrate it, giving Opioid2D true physics support.

When thinking about how to integrate drawing primitive shapes with the action system, I've built a prototype for a more generalized action API. This is something that will be released both as a part of Opioid2D and as a standalone action library that can be used with any Python program (pygame games etc.). The API currently looks like this:

@action
def example():
   size = interval(10, 15, time=0.5, mode=pingpong)
   for x,y in interval(start=(50,0), end=(70,100), time=2):
       draw.color = (255,0,0)
       draw.circle(x, y, size.value)
       yield
   for alpha in interval(255, 0, time=0.5):
       draw.color = (255,0,0,alpha)
       draw.circle(70, 100, size.value)
       yield

How does that look? My goal was to design the API so that it would be somewhat clear what the code does, even for someone not familiar with the API beforehand. interval objects give a value based on the current time and their initial parameters, so for example interval(0, 10, time=10) will increase its value by 1 per second until it reaches 10. yield is used to suspend the action until the next frame update.