Opengl drawing of pygame.sprite objects. With hopefully minimal/no changes to programs, and big speed increases.

Rene Dudfield. illumen@yahoo.com

TODO:

First compatibilty, optimization, then next gen.

NOTE: there are some more TODO's sprinkled througout the code

Compatibilty. - need to implement all of screens methods.

• test on more games. - chimp(works).

  • pyddr(doesn't work). - I think it has to do with the different format images. - I think a conversion may not be working properly.

  • bleten(works). - works, but is kinda slow when lots of images change. - need to work on a scaling method which uses opengl. - need to not use tostring() for making textures(slow). - work on caching some more, so that there is a texture cache as well. - so that images don't need to be uploaded to the card all the time.

  • yass(don't know).

• a better way to detect when an images contents have changed. - probably a wrapper around surface, and surfarray which marks the image as dirty. - split sprites larger than 256x256 into multiple smaller textures. - for some older 3d cards. - should figure out how to detect max texture size.

• support 8 and 16 bit and color keyed textures. - Make sure textures are cleaned up correctly in all cases. - Beta test on a wide number of machines.

• Make it work correctly when the screen size changes.

Optimization.

• Put multiple sprites onto the same texture, and use uv coords for drawing particular sprites. This is a big optimization. - especially for animation.

• move all texture management into the group, so as to optimize texture drawing more easily.

• Have a set max number of textures to use in a texture cache. - Cache textures

• optimize the screen.blit function, and some others: - with blit, only update a certain part of the texture which was actually blitted. - screen.fill

• Group drawing by the same texture(less texture binds). - Try display lists to see if better performing. - try vertex buffers for better performance. - Make 1000+ sprite test case, and optimize for this case. - Update texture instead of replacing it when: - some pixels change in an image. - when the image changes and the old one isn't to be used anymore. - How to know this?

Next gen. - Add scaling, rotation, other effects to a sprite class. - use caching of images for sdl, and straight opengl calls(eg glRotate etc). - shadows from sprites onto the background. - Make classes/optimize existing classes for drawing: - scrollers, tile maps, height maps, - 3d animated characters (http://www.py3d.org/py3d_zwiki/milkshape3d_animation) - doomIII clone ;)

gl_display_get_surface ()

gl_display_set_mode ( *args )

gl_display_update ( *args )

gl_draw_line ( *args )

gl_transform_scale ( *args,  *kwargs )

nextPower ( x )

printw ( *args )