Tag Archives: pycave

pyCave: Porting to mac.

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So for the past couple of days I have been porting pyCave to my mac. Yesterday was the day I thought the work was pretty much finished (It’s not).

I did it by starting with a GL demo written from scratch, and I went up from there adding features until I had a working copy of pyCave. Obviously, there was a lot of copy-pasting, but the overall writing involved a lot of redesign that ended up touching the whole program. The diff file was huge.

This wasn’t the original plan. The ‘project’ was called ‘glui’. It was only a module to build GL user interfaces. It eventually morphed into a new version of pycave =). There was only a single commit. Bad idea. But the code is the product of an intense non-stop coding session.

One of the first changes was adding an opengl extension checking mechanism. I found a nifty thing that pyOpenGL had. Every extension module has a member called EXTENSION_NAME. I used that to check for extensions in a very concise manner.
Little did I know that the nifty feature is actually only featured in the latest releases of pyOpenGL 3 (ubuntu beta releases don ‘t have it).

So i’m thinking that I’ll include a subset of the latest pyOpenGL (3.0.0) so that I won’t get emails from ubuntu users with Nvidia cards saying that the game doesn’t run.

The game runs almost perfectly on my Macbook with Python2.6. I was going to write about the hell I went through compiling pygame for Python2.6 on a mac (it’s practically impossible), but it’s a long story. I had to do it because I had screwed up the default Leopard python instalation thanks to a very stupid bash command.
Today I fixed my pretty apple-provided Python and tried to run pyCave (practically all my users will do the same).

It actually crashes.

The 2.5 and 2.6 versions have the same PyOpengl (release candidate 1). It is a very strange bug and I think my frankenstein python2.5 instalation is to blame. I am not sure.
A friend of mine just got a brand new Macbook (lower-end) and I would love for him to let me borrow it for a half hour to do some testing.

I am very optimistic that my 6 year old laptop will be able to run the game. It already does, but there is an odd bug in which all the edges are highlighted. It looks awesome with the proceduraly generated tunnel =) It also has the extension-checking bug, which should be fixed by adding the OpenGL module inside the pyCave distribution.

pyGame beta

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I have had this little game brewing for too long. It’s a small program. Around 2,000 lines of python.
I tried to keep it as “from scratch” as possible. I didn’t have a dependency on pygame until I had to add music. I wouldn’t hesitate to remove the pygame dependency if I found a lighter cross-platfrom sound library that was as simple to use as pycave.mixer.

I am not using shaders. Shadows were implemented after reading lots of papers with a depth map using OpenGL’s fixed functionality. I want to write a more sophisticated shadowing algorithm but it would be too painful without using shaders. I may add the functionality to pyCave but it may be out of the scope of the project, and it would introduce too much pain (see below on porting).

A few weeks ago I released a first beta to generally good reviews. Some people find it too difficult, while others (myself included) find it easy until they reach hardcore mode.
I have learned a few things about pyCave. First, dealing with video card drivers is a pain. Most laptops with intel integrated cards won’t work. They just render a black screen instead of showing the menu. I think it’s because they don’t support multi-texturing without using an opengl extension. I will prove it soon enough with the new interface code that I’m writing.
There was a very strange bug caused by trying to clear the stencil buffer. On my macbook it caused a bus error (mac-speak for segmentation fault). A friend running linux on a lap also had a segfault. I guess it was the same bug. I just removed the line since I am not using the stencil buffer =) It was just a left-over from when I was implementing shadow volumes.

Right now I’m working on making it more cross-platform. I wrote a little python module to check for available extensions. I am changing some abstractions in order to make the menu code less horrible. I will be happy when pyCave runs on my Macbook and another dying 5 year-old laptop.

For now, If you are on a desktop computer with an Nvidia graphics card, you can get pycave from

http://pycave.sourceforge.net/index.php
(svn version is better ;)

SFCave clone update

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Last night I didn’t sleep since I was at a lan party, so I made a lot of mistakes this morning while working on my little game. I wrote some sprite code to show smoke, after creating a sprite doing some photo-editing in gimp. Then I made a separate display list for the tunnel obstacles so they can cast shadows on the tunnel.
I think it is looking really cool now, so I uploaded a video to YouTube, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/v/RRrAkE2VQYA&hl=en&fs=1

I am still going to put the video on pyCave’s website.