Future Musings
I've apparently lived in a cave for the last few months (or in actuality, at the work place) and was almost completely oblivious to the existence of pyglet, before it was pointed out to me in IRC today. Sure, I had heard about pyglet before and had a vague idea about what it was, but I had no idea it was already this advanced and sophisticated. Alex Holkner and the other pyglet contributors have really done a terrific job.
Opioid2D development has been really slow lately. It's mostly because of my work projects, but also partly because it has started to become difficult to add new functionality to the Opioid2D core. As I've developed the framework, it has unintentionally been emphasizing very specific kind of sprite based games (which were what I was mainly using pygext for when I started porting it to C++) to the point where the code base has become rather monolithic against certain kind of fundamental changes. I ran into this when implementing the box2d integration and while I would've gotten around the problems for that particular feature, there are same kind of problems when implementing support for isometric games or even plain 2D tile maps.
The main issue is that there is too much stuff that's coded in C++, that could just as well be pure Python and the C++ components have too much hard-coded dependencies to each other. It pains me to admit this, but pygext (my previous framework) was actually a lot more flexible and malleable, all while providing a nearly identical main API. On the other hand, the performance is way better, still over 10x for a large number of sprites, even with the latest improvements to psyco and the CPython interpreter.
At this point, I see it as a very attractive option to abandon most of the C++ core of Opioid2D, and migrate the API to use pyglet. Pyglet does lot of the low level stuff like windowing, timers, events etc. a lot better and cleaner than the Opioid2D code. I would also break up the Opioid2D framework into smaller, reusable components that could be cherry-picked into pyglet projects, instead of conforming your whole program to the "Opioid2D way" of doing things. The sprite engine would be cleaned up and written as a C extension (with box2d doing collision detection and physics) that would be an independent component that could be used by any pyglet project. Lastly, there would be a backwards compatibility layer called "Opioid2D" that would use these new, small components and transparently provide the same API as the current incarnation.
I haven't decided anything yet, but the above idea is one thoughtworthy possibility for the future of Opioid2D.
Opioid2D development has been really slow lately. It's mostly because of my work projects, but also partly because it has started to become difficult to add new functionality to the Opioid2D core. As I've developed the framework, it has unintentionally been emphasizing very specific kind of sprite based games (which were what I was mainly using pygext for when I started porting it to C++) to the point where the code base has become rather monolithic against certain kind of fundamental changes. I ran into this when implementing the box2d integration and while I would've gotten around the problems for that particular feature, there are same kind of problems when implementing support for isometric games or even plain 2D tile maps.
The main issue is that there is too much stuff that's coded in C++, that could just as well be pure Python and the C++ components have too much hard-coded dependencies to each other. It pains me to admit this, but pygext (my previous framework) was actually a lot more flexible and malleable, all while providing a nearly identical main API. On the other hand, the performance is way better, still over 10x for a large number of sprites, even with the latest improvements to psyco and the CPython interpreter.
At this point, I see it as a very attractive option to abandon most of the C++ core of Opioid2D, and migrate the API to use pyglet. Pyglet does lot of the low level stuff like windowing, timers, events etc. a lot better and cleaner than the Opioid2D code. I would also break up the Opioid2D framework into smaller, reusable components that could be cherry-picked into pyglet projects, instead of conforming your whole program to the "Opioid2D way" of doing things. The sprite engine would be cleaned up and written as a C extension (with box2d doing collision detection and physics) that would be an independent component that could be used by any pyglet project. Lastly, there would be a backwards compatibility layer called "Opioid2D" that would use these new, small components and transparently provide the same API as the current incarnation.
I haven't decided anything yet, but the above idea is one thoughtworthy possibility for the future of Opioid2D.
posted by shang at 19:44
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