Quote:Original post by Zahlman Did you make something yet?
Was it too slow?
QFT. Until you've actually made something and found it isn't fast enough you shouldn't really worry about it; Python should be plenty fast enough to make some simpler games while you're learning, and by the point you get to something more complicated you'll have learned enough to be able to do what's needed to speed it up.
as most of the posters above have allready said, python is generally fast enough, and when it comes to development time python is very fast, thus you'll complete the project in less time, or get more time to optimize your algoritms (and those are what really matters most of the time).
given an infinite amount of development time and infinite knowledge about your hardware platform assembly languages would give the best results, however as far as i know no person or company has an infinite amount of time and knowledge.
Use python to make the game you want, if some piece of code takes too long to run you can try to optimize the algoritm, if you need even more speed after that you can consider implementing that algoritm as a native function. (using for example C or C++).
most commonly used functions and algoritms are allready implemented though, ScientificPython for example has native implementations of vectors, linear interpolation, quaternions, and alot of other calculation heavy things.
pygame has native functions (through SDL) for graphics etc.
a simple google search should help you find other native modules you might want if you need to improve performance in some area.
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Quote:Original post by double O seven But you wanna see how slow python is when its used to make a game? Go to the prairie games site and download the demo for a game called Minions of Mirth. That game employ's python for gameplay.
Uh, I could write a text adventure that runs like crap in pure assembly.
I've never heard anyone complain about the performance of PyOgre, and I've seen some pretty impressive stuff done with it. You can also take Civilization 4 for a professional example of using Python in a game.
The bottom line is that if you're doing lots of math, you may want to push it out to C/C++ extensions (esp. Python wrappers around C/C++ libraries). Python is a mature, popular language with many premade wrappers available, and it's not hard to make your own with SWIG or Boost.Python if you need to. Worrying about wasting a couple CPU cycles when you're developing for 2-3GHz processors is...crazy. The algorithms and data structures you use are many orders of magnitude more important than the language.
Your right, I'm not saying that python is a bad thing to make a game with, but based on the performance of Minions of Mirth, I would never use it for a project, but thats just me. I've heard so many negative reviews about that game its ridiculous. Even its gamespot site has some really negative feedback. Some people complain that half the time they cant even get it running.
But like I said, I'm all for python. All I'm implying is dont expect AAA results from it. In my opinion, if you want something thats potentially golden, go with C/C++ and endure some pain.
Quote:Original post by blaze02 You can expect a 10% overhead to most pieces of code. But this heavily depends on what type of code.
It'll be way more than that. I can't say specifically because it really does depend on the specific task being performed. However, I am not concerned with the speed of python. With the ctypes module (built-in as of 2.5 I think...) it's extraordinarily easy to build a C (or C++) library and use it from python.
Quote:Original post by double O seven But like I said, I'm all for python. All I'm implying is dont expect AAA results from it. In my opinion, if you want something thats potentially golden, go with C/C++ and endure some pain.
Some AAA games which use python (feel free to add to this list): Disney's Toontown Online EVE Online Battlefield 2 Civilization IV
Quote:Original post by double O seven Your right, I'm not saying that python is a bad thing to make a game with, but based on the performance of Minions of Mirth, I would never use it for a project, but thats just me. I've heard so many negative reviews about that game its ridiculous. Even its gamespot site has some really negative feedback. Some people complain that half the time they cant even get it running.
But like I said, I'm all for python. All I'm implying is dont expect AAA results from it. In my opinion, if you want something thats potentially golden, go with C/C++ and endure some pain.
You're talking utter nonsense. You seem to have made the jump from "a game written in Python runs poorly" to "Python is bad for games" without the slightest shred of evidence. Did you fail basic logic? I can name more than a few games written with C++ and DirectX that run like crap. Should I assume that this is because they were written with C++/DirectX, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary? And since when is Civ4 not a AAA title?
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ Is an attempt to objectively evaluate the execution speed, program size, memory usage and other stuff for the most popular languages (or more precisely, compilers). You will see Python perform quite poorly in terms of speed, but check out the lines of code you will need (hint, much fewer than most other languages).
Quote:Original post by double O seven Your right, I'm not saying that python is a bad thing to make a game with, but based on the performance of Minions of Mirth, I would never use it for a project, but thats just me. I've heard so many negative reviews about that game its ridiculous. Even its gamespot site has some really negative feedback. Some people complain that half the time they cant even get it running.
But like I said, I'm all for python. All I'm implying is dont expect AAA results from it. In my opinion, if you want something thats potentially golden, go with C/C++ and endure some pain.
You're talking utter nonsense. You seem to have made the jump from "a game written in Python runs poorly" to "Python is bad for games" without the slightest shred of evidence. Did you fail basic logic? I can name more than a few games written with C++ and DirectX that run like crap. Should I assume that this is because they were written with C++/DirectX, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary? And since when is Civ4 not a AAA title?
Yeah, ya'll are right, I was wrong. I apologize if that crap sounded misleading. Forgive me. Come to think of it, a lot of colleges and technical institutes start people from higher level languages like python and stuff like that so the students can grasp a better understanding of programming. To the original poster, keep practicing with python bro, your doing right. I should probably start with python too since I said all that crap out of pride.
EVE-Online is an MMORPG developed in stackless Python (with critical areas of the client and server running in C++, while virtually everything else is Python).