In the past couple days I've made two large changes to my project. First, I've started using Chipmunk for physics (and pymunk for Python bindings). This has been a great choice so far. Integrating Chipmunk into my game was painless and the results have been very good. I had initial difficulties getting movement of the player to work well with the physics engine, but the creator of Chipmunk pointed me towards the tanks demo project that Chipmunk ships with. It uses a dummy body bound to the actual body with a pivot joint to control velocity while respecting a maximum force to keep the physics happy. It works perfectly.

The second change, which prompted the first one, is the addition of maps to the game. For now, it's a simple grid of either open spaces or blocks, but I'll be expanding upon that as needed. Thanks to Chipmunk, it was easy to get this working with the existing game.

However, these changes have meant that I've broken multiplayer again, and the py2exe setup needs tweaking. So instead of an executable demo, I've just got this oh-so-pretty picture. Enjoy!