Here is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about it.

The PyWeek and Ludumdare game development competitions are finished.

The Ludumdare competition had a massive 599 finished entries this time.  The voting has finished now, so go check out the winners.

PyWeek had 110 finished entries, and voting has just began.  So it is time to play the entries and vote on them (if you submitted a game yourself).

Congratulations to anyone who participated in either of the game jams.

There is going to be a virtual sprint, combined with a real life pygame sprint in the uk. What that means, is a weekend of hacking on pygame. More details here if you want to join in.

We've entered the tenties, and moved over to one of pythons favourite version control systems mercurial. This is hosted by the kind folks over at bitbucket. Big thanks to seul.org who have previously hosted our subversion and even cvs version control accounts.

Here is the pygame bitbucket page: https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame. This should make it easier to administer, and also for external developers to collaborate more. So if you've been thinking about hacking on pygame - now is your chance!

We've also migrated our bug tracking from bugzilla to bitbucket issues. Thanks to James Paige, who has been running our bugzilla over the years. We have converted all of the bugs into issues - and given them a little bit of attention whilst we were at it too.

The new url for pygame issues is here: https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/issues

To see more information about the migration please see the mailing list or see this migration issue.

The 13th Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek) is coming. It'll run from Sunday the 11th of September to Sunday the 19th of September.

The PyWeek challenge:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ <~-,. it's all there. ♥

There is a new commenting system for projects. It uses the disqus engine, which is a super pro commenting system (written in python too!). Now you can make comments without logging into pygame.org, it handles spam, it does gravitars, aggregates comments from websites like reddit, HN, and others. It also does 'link backs' and other cool made up nonsense. One cool thing is that you can get emails when someone comments on your project. So it helps you discussion of your projects with people. So if you want to get emailed when someone writes about your project... well now you can!

The old commenting system is still there below the disquss ones, so nothing is lost. You can also still post a comment with your pygame.org account if you want. The best thing is now people don't have to log in to post a comment anymore. "Many times in the past I have wanted to make a comment but just didn't put the effort into registering".

Hope you like it!

http://twitter.com/pygame_org

If you want to hear tweets from our snakey with the controller stuck in its mouth follow @pygame_org. It might also mention pygame related 'news' by retweeting stuff you people write about pygame. #winning #wedding!

Testing. Testing. 1, 2, 3. Echo. Echo.

We've migrated pygame.org to a new webserver. Subversion, and mailing lists are still at the seul servers. I hope everything is working ok.

Welcome.

Two game development "competitions" popular amongst the participate in are happening in April/May. Ludumdare 48h (from scratch, solo competition using any language) and Pyweek (one week, solo or teams, using python). Both are not about prizes, but are about a creative outlet for heaps of people making games at once around the world.

Ludum Dare 20 - April 29th-May 2nd Weekend

Find out more about Ludum Dare - "Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community."

Pyweek 12 - April 3rd-April 10th

Find out more about PyWeek - "Invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Is intended to be challenging and fun. Will hopefully increase the public body of game tools code and expertise. Will let a lot of people actually finish a game. May inspire new projects (with ready made teams!)"

Pygame has passed revision 3000 (**) in SVN! So what has changed. I have spent some time adding array struct interface support to pygame.mixer.Sound and pygame.Surface objects. For those unfamiliar with the array interface, it is a protocol designed by the NumPy people that describes an object's internal data as an array. Unlike the new buffer protocol introduced in Python 3, the array protocol is stable and is supported by NumPy in Python's 2.4 and 2.5. pygame.surfarray.blit_surface has used the array interface for awhile now.

Also added is the new pixelcopy module, which also works on array interfaces, and moves most of the Python code for handling NumPy in surfarray into C. This should provide some of the speedup that has been promised since the release of Pygame 1.9.0. It also adds new functionality, such as pixels_red, pixels_green, and pixels_blue to surfarray. The module is still being developed, but it fully implements existing surfarray functionality.

So if anyone is serious about using NumPy in their projects, please give the latest Pygame from SVN a try. I could use the feedback.

Lenard Lindstrom

(**) bb8 hex, 101110111000 binary, 149A base 13, ... (Okay, so it is meaningless in an of itself.)