Pygame wrapper

The Pygame wrapper is called olpcgames. For a tutorial on how to use it, see Game development HOWTO. This is the reference manual.

Getting the wrapper

Eventually, the wrapper will be a part of the standard build. Before then, you need to get it from Git:

git clone git://dev.laptop.org/projects/games-misc

The 'olpcgames' directory is the package in question. Submodules you can access are activity, canvas, camera, and pangofont. The wrapper also replaces certain Python modules (python.event) with 'eventwrap' (which can also be imported separately), so we document those here too.

Activity

The olpcgames.activity module encapsulates creation of a Pygame activity. Your Activity should inherit from this class. Simply setting some class attributes is all you need to do in a class inheriting from olpcgames.activity.PyGameActivity in order to get Pygame to work.

class PyGameActivity(activity.Activity):
        
    game_name = None
    game_title = 'PyGame Game'
    game_handler = None
    game_size = (units.grid_to_pixels(16),
                 units.grid_to_pixels(11))
    pygame_mode = 'SDL'

game_name: This is a string containing the name of the module and, optionally a colon followed by the name of the main method (example: "tictactoe:main"). If there's no main method specified it defaults to "main". In this example, the wrapper code will import the module named "tictactoe" and call main() on it. That is expected to enter a Pygame main loop (which makes some call into pygame.event periodically, see Pygame wrapper#Eventwrap).

game_title: