PySoy Beta-2 response!

12 hours after the PySoy Beta2 release we've had over 120 downloads, about half of which for Windows.

Some users were quick to point out we forgot three dll's in the installer; glew, iconv, and zlib1. We're rebuilding the installers for Windows to include these and testing to ensure we didn't forget anything else.

PySoy Beta-2 Released!

We finished up the spit-n-polish work tonight and shipped the second "beta" of our 3D game engine for Python!

Included is support for Microsoft Windows (with nice bdist graphical installer), keyboard input and an early draft of the controller-action system, text rendering thanks to Cairo, support for Joints, and other enhancements and fixes too numerous to list.

While over a dozen developers contributed to this release I'd like to especially thank Kirk McDonald for porting the engine to Windows API, Derek Rhodes for getting the Cairo support in, Eric Stein for his work from Summer of Code and since, and Piet Delport who provided countless hours of help to all of us with Pyrex-related issues.

We're far from done so please download, enjoy, give feedback, and if so inspired help us reach 1.0!

r600

A quick update to INSTALL (dependencies list) brings us up to r600. This makes about 50 commits in the past month.

... of course with the sprint ongoing we're likely to reach r750 by PySoy's Beta-2 release next week.

fresh soymilk!

While this is a blog about PySoy, a 3d engine for Python, this post is about a soy related product I recently fell in love with.

It's called the SoyQuick soymilk machine. Basically a pitcher, heating element, grinder, filter screen, and some sensors in one package.

You throw in 2/3 cup of soaked soy beans, fill water to a line in the pitcher, plug in a standard power chord (same as computers use), press the start button, and 15 minutes later fresh soymilk in the pitcher and okara in the filter basket.

This awesome machine plus an ample supply of Special Gunpowder Green Tea is what's fueling me through the PySoy Beta-2 release process.

Beta-2 task assignments

Looking at beta2 tickets there's an extremely disproportionate number of tickets being handled by yours truly.

If you can participate later this week or as part of the sprint, please take a look through what needs to be done and volunteer yourself for some of the workload. Many of these unassigned tickets almost anyone can do without previous experience with PySoy.

Sprinting to Beta-2

What a better way to kick off 2008 than with the long-awaited Beta-2 release of PySoy?

We've been lazy though, very little has been committed since Beta-1's release a few months ago. To play catchup and get us focused enough to reach this goal a sprint has been scheduled for the last weekend of 2007 (Dec 28-30).

The physical site for the sprint is in Manchester, NH. A bank of public IPs (no NAT), caffeine, desktop space, and inflatable crash mats await those able to make it. RSVP for the address.

For those working from home we'll have IRC and video conferencing throughout the weekend. If you're planning to participate join #PySoy or get your webcam working with Ekiga.

Even if you have no experience with C programming or OpenGL we need people for documentation, writing examples, and unit testing. Being inexperienced is an advantage for locating inadequately documented classes and filling in the gaps!

Every serious participant will be mailed a silk-screened "PySoy Sprint 2007" patch. Sews easily to a backpack, jacket, etc to let the world know that you helped make the PySoy revolution!

dependencies upgraded

Pyrex 0.9.6

There's a few API changes which result in warnings, we're going to keep things the way they are now until Ubuntu and a few other distributions have this version available, or 0.9.7 is released, whichever comes soonest.

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ODE 0.9

ODE's new version comes without an updated changelog, however, a diff on the include directories shows very few API changes from 0.8.

Because Ubuntu 7.10 just came out with ODE 0.8 we're going to stick with ODE 0.8 compatibility for the time being. Those previously trying to install PySoy on Ubuntu may remember having to manually install ODE 0.8 as the last packaged version available for Ubuntu was 0.5.

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Theora

We may need to update for libtheora beta2 since there were numerous changes since alpha7, however, beta2 is not packaged for most distros yet (ie, both Gentoo and Ubuntu only run alpha7). It would seem prudent to stick with alpha7 for now.

Server move

The server hosting *.pysoy.org has been moved from Ithaca, NY to my new home in Manchester, NH.

It's now on a much faster connection (I've clocked over 850k up) and a decent UPS to reduce downtime to near-zero. I used the switchover time to upgrade the software and tighten security a bit, too.

Sorry for the downtime, it'll be worth it in the long run.

Maintainer's Update

It's been awhile since I've posted so a quick update;

We've got two new developers, KirkMcDonald and DerekRhodes. Kirk has taken over the Win32 porting and Derek is working on materials/textures.

Toba has remained active after Summer of Code. He's also the only student to complete his SoC project and thus receive full payment.

I've been in the process of moving so my free time for PySoy has been limited. I'm generally available via IRC for questions and, now living in Manchester NH, will be able to pound out some code again once part of my studio is setup here. It's going to take me months more to move it all.

We'll have Beta-2 out by the end of the year at the current rate with Win32 compatibility, input handling, and model+texture loading/saving.

beautiful mistakes

Fullscreen and splash window (ie borderless) support is in. I ran several systems overnight with a script which flips between fullscreen and windowed every second to ensure there's no threading issues with the new code.

In the process I generated this great mistake, basically what happens when you don't clear the background while rendering the collision blocks. We're going to have to do more complicated mojo to make splash windows "transparent".

Overall work on the engine is on-track for Beta-2.

Now on to dynamic text textures