- Casey Duncan: “Grease: it’s a game framework, no it’s a game engine, no it’s a framework for making game engines; and now it’s more than just vaporware!” Grease is an open-source project for rapid Python game development. Casey is going to give a little guided tour of the not-just-sci-fi-anymore Grease API and talk a bit about future directions. He is also going to talk about using Sphinx to document Grease, and how you can, and should, use it to document your own projects and ideas.
- Al Sweigart : “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python.” Al’s presentation will cover his book which teaches kids (and adult beginners) how to program by making computer games. Al will talk about the methodology his book uses, things he’s learned about teaching programming and games, and about how games can bring more people into software development. The book is under a Creative Commons license and is available for free at http://inventwithpython.com. The book is also for sale in print on Amazon.com.
June 7, 2010
PyGameSF meetup Wednesday June 9th 6pm @ Main SF public library 4th floor Sycip room
The June PyGameSF meet up will be at the Sycip conference room on the fourth floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:
May 23, 2010
PyGameSF meetup Wednesday May 26th 6pm @ Main SF Public Library
The May PyGameSF meet up will be at the Sycip conference room on the fourth floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:
- Dan Grover : Audio on the iPhone/iPad. produce visually striking results. Dan (guy behind shovebox, etude, simplechord and phonefinger) will give an overview of the audio APIs available on the iPhone OS.
- Warren Stringer: Ontological synesthesia – performing visual music on the iPad. Warren Stringer will be showing Tr3, a platform for creating real time ontologies. Warren will be using Tr3 and OSC to create a visual music performance, using two iPads, projector, one iPhone, and one iPod touch. Anyone with OSC music controllers are welcome to join in. More information can be found here.
May 19, 2010
Google IO day 1
Just got back from google IO 2010 day 1. Here are my disjointed ruminations concerning the event. The keynote was all about pimping html 5 and chrome. It was a total yawn fest consisting mainly of boring web app demo’s, dreamweaver, etc. In short nothing particularly new or exciting was revealed. The most interesting facts I took away: chrome now has 70 million users up from 30 million, their is some sort of chrome app store in the works and google also blew $120 million on buying a company with a bunch of video codecs which they are open sourcing.
While the keynote was all about the web most of the people in attendance seemed to be all about Android and the mobile space. From the breakout sessions to the floor, everything todo with Android was jam packed compared to the other google technologies on offer. Based on some of the conversations I had, I would say about 50-70% of the people attending were at the event for Android related stuff. Towards the end of the conference some of the Android breakout sessions were so packed that me and a large number of other developers could not get in despite arriving more than ten minutes early. In contrast the google enterprise room looked totally empty.
The wall of Android devices on display was an impressive testament to how far the platform has come since the launch of the g1 October 2008, my touch April 2009, nexus one January 2010. The list of devices running android is impressive and growing. Notably absent from the event was Dell, despite the fact that several of their devices were included in the wall. An interesting thing about seeing all the different Android phones/devices on display together was that you really got to see what a fractured experience the whole platform currently is right now. Samsung, HTC had great looking phones with Android 2.0/2.1, very shiny fun to play with. Most of the Motorola/Sony/LG’s stuff was all 1.5/1.6, some of the hardware was nice but the confusing custom UI skins and bizarre half baked in house apps just made using them a total shit show.
One of the sessions I attended was on writing real time games for Android. The session was quite OpenGL ES focused and gave a nice high level overview of the Android hardware landscape. Specifically the technical part of the session dealt with: practical differences between Android operating system versions which you need to think about when writing games, common OpenGL extensions used to achieve better performances and how to design a multithreaded java/native code game for the platform and the accompanying pit falls you might encounter.
One thing I had hoped to get out of the session was a hint as to where google is going to take Android with regard to audio/multimedia programming capabilities. No hints were revealed in this session. In fact one of the first question the speaker received was about doing audio programming in games. I was not super impressed by the answer given which was basically do your mixing with PCM using native code (c/c++) and pass it back to the java Android media stack… So how is this going to gel with Android x86 devices? If Intel really is part of the big google tv/set top box announcement thats supposed to happen tomorrow that means some or all of those devices will be running on x86 not ARM (chip architecture that most Android devices use) which means the current crop of apps will have to recompile to target those platforms. Audio games are pretty hot right now (checkout titles from Smule, guitar hero, rock band, etc). Iphone has OpenAL support, which is an open industry standard, why not Android? Multimedia is still very much the achilles heal of the Android platform in my book.
Another point that came up in the game development session I attended was the way that games get noticed and become hits in the Android app store. The google guy giving the presentation had a graph showing the download rate for his game replica island which was free and had a few million downloads since it launched. With no press release, just uploading it and giving a single talk to about 200 developers to announce its launch, he saw roughly 8k downloads per day. A subsequent press release which he had written and being featured by a prominent blog such as gizmodo got him a significant bump in download traffic but all of this paled in comparison to the massive jump that being a featured app in the market place got him. This is the same story as in the Iphone app store.
The takeaway is that discovery in both google/apple’s app stores is a big problem exasperated by the fact that many mobile games companies seem to adopt the following strategy: Chrun out about 50 low quality games, pray for one of them to hit gold, then abandom them all once interest drops off. This causes the market to be flooded with shitty low quality apps. Another interesting piece of information from the game development talk was that the average paid app seemed to go for about $3.50 a pop, a price not to far from the average paid app on Iphone. Mobile games/apps have a lower price elasticity than desktop/console games. Hence the aforementioned business model.
Gaming is all about the numbers and with mobile devices the rule is going to be all about lowering production costs by leveraging existing assets (i.e easily porting games to different platforms is huge). I got to see a demo of Unity running on an Android tablet (looked good) at the conference. Very interesting considering the recent rumblings about apps developed with such toolkits as flash/Unity being banned from the Iphone app store. Unity is a game editor which allows developers to write games which will run on multiple platforms (wii, ps3, web, iphone/ipad, osx, etc), apparently they are about to release an Android version of their product which they were demoing at the conference. This is significant as a number of the top ten games on Iphone are built with Unity. Given the effects that a ban on games developed with such tools could have on the cost of creating cross platform mobile games it will be interesting to see how the economics of the mobile game development scene plays out.
Tomorrow seems set to be the big day: froyo (Android 2.2), possibly some free tech goodies given out, what are Logitech/Sony/Intel going to unveil with regard to set top boxes, what will flash be like on Android. Fun times.
While the keynote was all about the web most of the people in attendance seemed to be all about Android and the mobile space. From the breakout sessions to the floor, everything todo with Android was jam packed compared to the other google technologies on offer. Based on some of the conversations I had, I would say about 50-70% of the people attending were at the event for Android related stuff. Towards the end of the conference some of the Android breakout sessions were so packed that me and a large number of other developers could not get in despite arriving more than ten minutes early. In contrast the google enterprise room looked totally empty.
The wall of Android devices on display was an impressive testament to how far the platform has come since the launch of the g1 October 2008, my touch April 2009, nexus one January 2010. The list of devices running android is impressive and growing. Notably absent from the event was Dell, despite the fact that several of their devices were included in the wall. An interesting thing about seeing all the different Android phones/devices on display together was that you really got to see what a fractured experience the whole platform currently is right now. Samsung, HTC had great looking phones with Android 2.0/2.1, very shiny fun to play with. Most of the Motorola/Sony/LG’s stuff was all 1.5/1.6, some of the hardware was nice but the confusing custom UI skins and bizarre half baked in house apps just made using them a total shit show.
One of the sessions I attended was on writing real time games for Android. The session was quite OpenGL ES focused and gave a nice high level overview of the Android hardware landscape. Specifically the technical part of the session dealt with: practical differences between Android operating system versions which you need to think about when writing games, common OpenGL extensions used to achieve better performances and how to design a multithreaded java/native code game for the platform and the accompanying pit falls you might encounter.
One thing I had hoped to get out of the session was a hint as to where google is going to take Android with regard to audio/multimedia programming capabilities. No hints were revealed in this session. In fact one of the first question the speaker received was about doing audio programming in games. I was not super impressed by the answer given which was basically do your mixing with PCM using native code (c/c++) and pass it back to the java Android media stack… So how is this going to gel with Android x86 devices? If Intel really is part of the big google tv/set top box announcement thats supposed to happen tomorrow that means some or all of those devices will be running on x86 not ARM (chip architecture that most Android devices use) which means the current crop of apps will have to recompile to target those platforms. Audio games are pretty hot right now (checkout titles from Smule, guitar hero, rock band, etc). Iphone has OpenAL support, which is an open industry standard, why not Android? Multimedia is still very much the achilles heal of the Android platform in my book.
Another point that came up in the game development session I attended was the way that games get noticed and become hits in the Android app store. The google guy giving the presentation had a graph showing the download rate for his game replica island which was free and had a few million downloads since it launched. With no press release, just uploading it and giving a single talk to about 200 developers to announce its launch, he saw roughly 8k downloads per day. A subsequent press release which he had written and being featured by a prominent blog such as gizmodo got him a significant bump in download traffic but all of this paled in comparison to the massive jump that being a featured app in the market place got him. This is the same story as in the Iphone app store.
The takeaway is that discovery in both google/apple’s app stores is a big problem exasperated by the fact that many mobile games companies seem to adopt the following strategy: Chrun out about 50 low quality games, pray for one of them to hit gold, then abandom them all once interest drops off. This causes the market to be flooded with shitty low quality apps. Another interesting piece of information from the game development talk was that the average paid app seemed to go for about $3.50 a pop, a price not to far from the average paid app on Iphone. Mobile games/apps have a lower price elasticity than desktop/console games. Hence the aforementioned business model.
Gaming is all about the numbers and with mobile devices the rule is going to be all about lowering production costs by leveraging existing assets (i.e easily porting games to different platforms is huge). I got to see a demo of Unity running on an Android tablet (looked good) at the conference. Very interesting considering the recent rumblings about apps developed with such toolkits as flash/Unity being banned from the Iphone app store. Unity is a game editor which allows developers to write games which will run on multiple platforms (wii, ps3, web, iphone/ipad, osx, etc), apparently they are about to release an Android version of their product which they were demoing at the conference. This is significant as a number of the top ten games on Iphone are built with Unity. Given the effects that a ban on games developed with such tools could have on the cost of creating cross platform mobile games it will be interesting to see how the economics of the mobile game development scene plays out.
Tomorrow seems set to be the big day: froyo (Android 2.2), possibly some free tech goodies given out, what are Logitech/Sony/Intel going to unveil with regard to set top boxes, what will flash be like on Android. Fun times.
May 15, 2010
Great article on the Irish economy
Recently I read a fantastic article in the financial times about Irelands economic crises. Overall I agreed with the piece but I found it a touch too optimistic about Irelands prospects going forward. The following are a collection of points I would make to support my thesis that Ireland is screwed for the next decade: 1) The vast majority of Irelands economy was construction or financial/legal services supporting construction (I think about 60% GDP was the figure I saw when I did a course on banking back in 2007). 2) Irelands current infrastructure (everything from roads to internet) is a joke and unlikely too get better due to the fact that massive amounts of public funding has been diverted into propping up property values through NAMA. 3) Current Irish bankruptcy laws are incredibly severe. A consequence of this is that many business are locked into inflated leases which puts limits on how quickly prices of food and other goods can come down. The end result of all this is that Ireland is still very over priced despite the fact that the ass has fallen out of the economy.
The big question this article raises for me is, given all of the above, how will Ireland’s economy reinvent itself? My prediction is changes in Irish bankruptcy laws will have to happen, massive gutting of public services (i.e education, healthcare) will occur and a decade of emigration for most young people while the nuclear winter clears itself up. The scary thing about all of this is that the USA, UK and a bunch of other countries seem to be in a similar position (i.e a large percentage of their economies were based on construction, this collapsed, the government stepped in and pumped a huge amount of money in to propping up banks/property prices). Even more disturbing is the fact that 50-60% of China’s economy is construction, what will happen when this property bubble pop’s?
The big question this article raises for me is, given all of the above, how will Ireland’s economy reinvent itself? My prediction is changes in Irish bankruptcy laws will have to happen, massive gutting of public services (i.e education, healthcare) will occur and a decade of emigration for most young people while the nuclear winter clears itself up. The scary thing about all of this is that the USA, UK and a bunch of other countries seem to be in a similar position (i.e a large percentage of their economies were based on construction, this collapsed, the government stepped in and pumped a huge amount of money in to propping up banks/property prices). Even more disturbing is the fact that 50-60% of China’s economy is construction, what will happen when this property bubble pop’s?
May 2, 2010
Movie Review: Primer
A super low budget movie about four entrepreneur engineer friends who create a time machine. One line review: Primer will make you cream your pants if movies about time travel floats your boat.
The plot revolves around the tensions between four friends working on an electrical engineering start up project in their spare time. When two of them suddenly stumble upon this amazingly valuable discovery their relationships begin to deteriorate. My favorite aspect of the movie has to be the beautifully confusing consequences of time travel that come about from this conflict. If this was a big budget flick it would be ruined by overwrought special effects which would be a total distraction. The lack of budget works to the films advantage, a true rarity for a science fiction flick.
The atmosphere right through out this movie is brilliant. The garage science DIY style look and feel contrasted with the antiseptic glass industrial park parts of Dallas gives this movie a unique and authentic flavor. The language used by all of characters is also spot on and very believable. In short, if you want a science fiction movie with a little more substance than most go stick this in your netflix que.
The plot revolves around the tensions between four friends working on an electrical engineering start up project in their spare time. When two of them suddenly stumble upon this amazingly valuable discovery their relationships begin to deteriorate. My favorite aspect of the movie has to be the beautifully confusing consequences of time travel that come about from this conflict. If this was a big budget flick it would be ruined by overwrought special effects which would be a total distraction. The lack of budget works to the films advantage, a true rarity for a science fiction flick.
The atmosphere right through out this movie is brilliant. The garage science DIY style look and feel contrasted with the antiseptic glass industrial park parts of Dallas gives this movie a unique and authentic flavor. The language used by all of characters is also spot on and very believable. In short, if you want a science fiction movie with a little more substance than most go stick this in your netflix que.
April 28, 2010
PyGameSF meetup Thursday April 29th 6pm @ Main San Francisco Public Library
The April PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:
- Colin Bean: Complex visualization with Pyglet and NumPy. An introduction to how complex numbers can be visualized ad 2D geometry, how geometric transformations can be described as operations on complex numbers, and how basic complex functions can produce visually striking results. Visualization code will be provided using Pyglet and NumPy. The material is based on Tristan Needham’s book “Visual Complex Analysis”.
- Harry Tormey: Mobile games to make you move around. Obesity has been cited as a contributing factor to approximately 100,000–400,000 deaths per year in the USA alone. To help address this problem the company I work for is having a competition to create an Android app that inspires and tracks physical movement using ourAPI’s. The grand prize for this competition : An all expenses paid trip to TED Global 2010. I will be demoing an example open source exercise tracking Android app and an accompanying pylons based web stack which displays information captured via the phone. Talk will cover: An introduction to Android, mobile data capture techniques and displaying information captured from the phone via a python based web backend using the Snaptic API.
April 5, 2010
First thoughts on the IPad
Initial thoughts on using the IPad. It feels significantly heavier than a kindle and holding one for protracted periods of time is a bit tiring on the wrists. Looks way better in real life than in pictures (bezels = not photogenic). Keyboard is a pain in the ass to use and requires the device to be tilted. Multi touch is super sexy and the device feels quite snappy and responsive. Overall using the device was a very fun experience.
Apps: Tried out Omnigraffle (awesome graphing tool for mac), felt a bit unresponsive and cumbersome at times but generally was fun to play with. Snaptic’s (company I now work for) 3banana note taking app is pretty cool, the changes made to the pad version for launch make it easier to navigate through your notes. Tried out Y! entertainment app, was pretty fun but not really my cup of tea as I bought hate tv guides and reading entertainment news (transitions looked sexy though, fun coffee table for your mum/girlfriend).
If I was an average user would I buy one? No. Seems like a decent first gen apple product and I can see a lot of fun media related products being written for it. I think for the average person the lack of a camera and a wide selection of mature multi touch software is a deal breaker. I do think developers should totally grab one right away as their is a lot of potential for this device once apple smoothes out some of the rough edges and a bunch of great software emerges. Several IPad’s are lying round my office so of course I will be hacking on them. It will be interesting to see how this device will stack up to the armada of android/windows 7 clones that are going to hit the market in the coming months.
Apps: Tried out Omnigraffle (awesome graphing tool for mac), felt a bit unresponsive and cumbersome at times but generally was fun to play with. Snaptic’s (company I now work for) 3banana note taking app is pretty cool, the changes made to the pad version for launch make it easier to navigate through your notes. Tried out Y! entertainment app, was pretty fun but not really my cup of tea as I bought hate tv guides and reading entertainment news (transitions looked sexy though, fun coffee table for your mum/girlfriend).
If I was an average user would I buy one? No. Seems like a decent first gen apple product and I can see a lot of fun media related products being written for it. I think for the average person the lack of a camera and a wide selection of mature multi touch software is a deal breaker. I do think developers should totally grab one right away as their is a lot of potential for this device once apple smoothes out some of the rough edges and a bunch of great software emerges. Several IPad’s are lying round my office so of course I will be hacking on them. It will be interesting to see how this device will stack up to the armada of android/windows 7 clones that are going to hit the market in the coming months.
March 2, 2010
PyGameSF meetup Tuesday March 2nd 6pm @ the Sycip room on the fourth floor of the Main San Francisco Public Library
The March PyGameSF meet up will be at the Sycip conference room on the fourth floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:
- Patrick Stinson: Embedding Python as a Realtime Audio Scripting Engine. Topics will include separation and communication between the application and scripting engine, why Python is “safe” for audio work including empirical performance metrics, and caveats related to multithreaded processing as performance requirements increase. I will share my experiences using the standard CPython implementation to research and develop a state-of-the-art scripting engine for the Play professional sampling engine (http://www.soundsonline.com).
- Shandy Brown : Structuring Your Game’s Code. One approach to designing video games with a focus on rapid development and networked multiplayer capabilities. Shandy Brown will highlight key ideas in his tutorial. Fundamental topics such as event-based design, defining your game model, and separating the model and the view will be covered.
December 31, 2009
PyGameSF meetup Tuesday January 12th 6pm @ Stong Main San Francisco Public Library
The January PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:
- Tim Thompson: the NthControl. For musical and visual performers, new touchscreen netbooks (Asus T91MT) and USB-connected touchscreens (Mimo 720-S) can augment the ubiquitous slider/knob/button box by providing a completely software-driven interface that avoids the bulk and distraction of a laptop interface. Tim has been experimenting in this area and will share his experience so far, including a demonstration of a python-based display/controller (NthControl) he is developing for upcoming musical/visual performances.
- Casey Duncan: Grease. Introducing Grease, a new open-source game engine for developing 2D games in Python. Grease is an component-based entity system with support for data-driven game development. Grease is designed from the ground-up for simplicity, rapid development and high-performance. It is intended to be fully interoperable with both pygame and pyglet, providing pluggable services for sprite and vector rendering, post-processing effects, physics, particle effects, event-driven logic scripting and eventually network support. Grease is in the early stages of development, Casey hopes to get input on the design and architecture, as well as encourage folks to contribute so they can use it for their own projects.