The February PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Shandy Brown : Structuring Your Game’s Code. One approach to designing video games with a focus on rapid development and networked multiplayer capabilities. Shandy Brown will highlight key ideas in his tutorial. Fundamental topics such as event-based design, defining your game model, and separating the model and the view will be covered.
• Warren Stringer: Tr3: A Tablet Ontology. Warren will be demonstrating Tr3 (pronounced tree), a media performance ontology that connects Human gestures to device interfaces, such as the iPad. Tr3 was designed for the novice, programmer, and designer. A novice will use Tr3 to orchestrate interactive media. A programmer will use Tr3 to wrap real-time APIs around their preferred language. A designer will use Tr3 to iterate through many user interfaces. Tr3 was started in 1998, as a patch bay for a synthesizer that used a variety of input devices to create visual music. The favorite device is a tablet, which was put in the hands of all age groups with universally mesmerizing results. Tr3 has been re-written to focus on multi-touch surfaces. Tr3 consists of a namespace, auto-scaled types, tree decorators, event observers, recordable sessions, code wrapper, ontology viewer, and a plug-in architecture for selling performances. An overview can be found here. Since this is a PyGame group, Warren will be demonstrating how Python reads in theTr3 definition and spits out a language parser in either Python or C++. Depending on availability, Warren will demonstrate a Tr3 wrapping a tablet based visual music synthesizer.

The January PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Tim Thompson: the NthControl. For musical and visual performers, new touchscreen netbooks (Asus T91MT) and USB-connected touchscreens (Mimo 720-S) can augment the ubiquitous slider/knob/button box by providing a completely software-driven interface that avoids the bulk and distraction of a laptop interface. Tim has been experimenting in this area and will share his experience so far, including a demonstration of a python-based display/controller (NthControl) he is developing for upcoming musical/visual performances.
• Casey Duncan: Grease. Introducing Grease, a new open-source game engine for developing 2D games in Python. Grease is an component-based entity system with support for data-driven game development. Grease is designed from the ground-up for simplicity, rapid development and high-performance. It is intended to be fully interoperable with both pygame and pyglet, providing pluggable services for sprite and vector rendering, post-processing effects, physics, particle effects, event-driven logic scripting and eventually network support. Grease is in the early stages of development, Casey hopes to get input on the design and architecture, as well as encourage folks to contribute so they can use it for their own projects.

Just letting everyone know that their will be no PyGameSF meet up till January next year. Happy holidays.

The October PyGameSF meet up will be at the PALEY (not the STONG) conference room on the third floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Shannon -jj Behrens, How to Blow Up Helicopters Using Pygame. The talk will consists of a summary of some of the libraries and tricks JJ used for his two PyWeek entries. It will be covering topics such as PGU, generator-based animations, and state machine based levels.
• Harry Tormey, Who is it? This talk will cover the in’s and outs of working with Facbook and pylons while giving an update on a social network game I am currently working on. (This talk will cover a lot of the material skipped over in the August presentation)

The September PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Brad Busse, Harry Tormey, Keith Nemitz: “If we did do Pyweek9, here’s how and what happened”. An overview of the pyweek
  experience, what works what doesn’t and why.
• Niall O’Higgins: “OAuth and OpenID: A Python Hacker’s Guide.” Niall gives an overview of his experiences working with both OAuth and
  OpenID.

The August PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Eric Bieschke and Casey Duncan: Xenotrader, a space trader MMO for the iPhone. The presentation will include such weighty topics as: Developing on Google App Engine, using jQuery and WebKit to create an interactive game, composing game sprites using nothing but CSS, HTML, masking tape and dental floss.
• Andrew Turley, Harry Tormey: Who is it?, anatomy of a facebook guessing game. This presentation will cover what it takes to build a facebook game while maintaining a modicum of sanity using pylons and
  sqlalchemy.

The July PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Colin Bean: Interactive graphics on the Android mobile platform. An introduction to writing an Android application, working with OpenGL ES and using with some of the sensors available on HTC handsets.
• Rudrasen : Prototyping an original 2D RPG. This talk is about rapid game prototyping concepts with a mix of investigation , learning and applying ideas.

The June PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

• Bret Truchan (Quotile/GlitchDS/Glitch-Sequencer): Exploring musical interfaces using Processing / OSC / and Chuck. Bret will unveil a new,open source software “synth” written in Processing and Chuck, and briefly
  discuss the architecture. He will also present some Processing code samples for drawing simple graphics, sending MIDI notes, sending OSC (Open Sound
  Control) messages, and handling timing. The presentation will be tailored to the beginning or intermediate developer who hasn’t been exposed to Processing or Chuck.
• Mitch Patenaude: How to confuse people and make enemies on Twitter. Mitch will give talk about what was involved in creating his markov chain based babbling TwitterBot. You can follow her or read her tweets here.

The slides from Jared Sohn’s presentation on flocking at the May PyGameSF meet up are now available here. I will post a link to the recording of the talk once I get round to converting and editing it.

Currently I am reading selected chapters from Robert Penner’s book Programming Macromedia Flash MX. Contrary to what you might think I am not interested in learning flash. What sold me on the book was the free chapter on Roberts website which provides a whole bunch of algorithms for performing tweening, easing and other things which make movement animations look good. I have been taking these algorithms, converting them to python and using them in some of the projects I have been working on.

If you make games or any sort of multimedia application that involves moving things around I highly recommend using some of these techniques. Check out and tweek different combinations of these algorithms via this excellent webapp. Also you can grab the actionscript source code (BSD licenced) and free chapter from here.

Roberts book sells for $40 first hand on amazon but thanks to the miracle depreciation of any modern tech book over three years old a second hand copy can be picked up for around $4. A second hand copy is totally worth the price of admittance as Robert does a great job of explaining general maths and programming techniques in a non language/library specific way.