= PyOpenGL / PyGame OpenSpace =

== Organizer ==
Mike Fletcher, PyOpenGL maintainer

== Attendees ==
Tim Sharpe, Jeff Epler, Chris Hagner, Thomas Shaw, Robert Ippolito, Shawn Wheatley, Michael Cornelius

== Notes ==

The initial attendees were mostly there as "listeners". They were interested in PyGame and PyOpenGL, but didn't have a lot of experience. Bob Ippolito was roped into talking to us. He has used PyGame as the framework for simulations -- not for gaming.

Chris Hagner has also played around with PyGame, and told us that the learning curve is fairly shallow. It  took only a short time and little code to get a tetris-like game on the screen. You can get into the design considerations of the game very quickly, without worrying about other implementation details.

"SolarWolf" was acclaimed by those that had seen it as the canonical PyGame game. Also the most fun.

PyGame supports sound via the SDL mixer, and displays PyOpenGL.

Mike Fletcher detached from the Business Forum at this point and joined us to lead a discussion of PyOpenGL. (Thank goodness. We were beginning to spiral out of control.) From that discussion came the following:

=== How to improve PyOpenGL ===

 * Support modern OpenGL features.
 * Change (fix) distribution mechanism. Ship the output of SWIG.

Yes, Virginia, PyOpenGL is integrated with numeric. It's necessary to have a good understanding of OpenGL to take advantage of this, because it's easy to make it dog-slow.

Finally, there are many 3D libraries (scene graph engines) available for Python:

 * Ogre
 * Crystal Space
 * ...the list can be found on http://www.py3d.org 

Mike Fletcher wants us all to know: PyOpenGL needs maintainers/developers!


Faithfully submitted via stream of consciousness,
Michael Cornelius