Category: English

PyWeek

Tomorrow, I’m going to participate in the fifth edition of PyWeek. PyWeek is a challenge in which participants must develop a video game in one week using Python. I like the idea because it brings a possibility to finish a project and have some fun by the way.

Some of the games created during PyWeek are really awesome. It’s amazing the fact that they were made in only one week. My favorite games of previous editions of PyWeek are:

I also like the competition and challenge feeling that you can breath in PyWeek.s

It’s possible to participate in two categories: Individual and Team. This time I am going to participate as Individual. I am thinking in use PyGame only. Even when some people are talking about Panda3D. I also want to use Blender to create pre-rendered sprites. I have been learning it secretly for a while. The result has been exactly what I expected: I suck as a graphic artist. My models are absolutely ugly, but at least I can do something for a game. By the way, now I prefer Blender to Wings3D for 3D modelling.

Screenshots of my attempt to model an aircraft with Blender. I also tried some kind of cell-shading or toon-shading redering:

If I suck with Blender. I prefer not even talk about my talent with sounds and music.

See you in one (py)week!

Vala

These days, a lot of people on GNOME planet are talking about Vala, a new programming language aimed to facilitate the development of applications and libraries for the GNOME platform. Vala is very similar to C#, but what is interesting about it, is that it’s perfectly integrated with the Glib/GObject object system. The compiler translates the Vala source code into C. It uses GObject to create classes and interfaces, and GIDL metadata for introspection. This has some advantages: there is no need for any additional runtime, Vala programs are compatible at ABI level with C programs, writing bindings for existing GNOME libraries is really easy and straightforward. Alberto Ruiz wrote about how simple was to write a binding for GtkMozEmbed. After look at howtraumatic were the Java bindings for Gtk, or how difficult has been the creation of GStreamer bindings for Mono, I think this is the best feature of Vala.

Anyway, I think Vala still lacks some key tools in order to become a real choice for GNOME developers. In the case of Mono, there is a great advantage called MonoDevelop. Days ago, version 0.15 of this awesome IDE was released. With no doubt, I think this is the best IDE for GNOME. The GUI editor, the subversion integration, the localization support and autotools integration are very appreciated features. Of course, is not perfect, It lacks a debugger and fixes for some annoying bugs, but it’s a very active project and has a great community behind it.

And talking about languages, at the end of this month, it should be released the alpha version of Python 3.0. On June, Guido van Rossum published a report about the final decisions concerning Python 3000. I am very happy with most of the changes, it was time to break some backwards compatibility. Python will be even better that what it is now.