pyGame beta

I have had this little game brewing for too long. It's a small program. Around 2,000 lines of python.
I tried to keep it as "from scratch" as possible. I didn't have a dependency on pygame until I had to add music. I wouldn't hesitate to remove the pygame dependency if I found a lighter cross-platfrom sound library that was as simple to use as pycave.mixer.

I am not using shaders. Shadows were implemented after reading lots of papers with a depth map using OpenGL's fixed functionality. I want to write a more sophisticated shadowing algorithm but it would be too painful without using shaders. I may add the functionality to pyCave but it may be out of the scope of the project, and it would introduce too much pain (see below on porting).

A few weeks ago I released a first beta to generally good reviews. Some people find it too difficult, while others (myself included) find it easy until they reach hardcore mode.
I have learned a few things about pyCave. First, dealing with video card drivers is a pain. Most laptops with intel integrated cards won't work. They just render a black screen instead of showing the menu. I think it's because they don't support multi-texturing without using an opengl extension. I will prove it soon enough with the new interface code that I'm writing.
There was a very strange bug caused by trying to clear the stencil buffer. On my macbook it caused a bus error (mac-speak for segmentation fault). A friend running linux on a lap also had a segfault. I guess it was the same bug. I just removed the line since I am not using the stencil buffer =) It was just a left-over from when I was implementing shadow volumes.

Right now I'm working on making it more cross-platform. I wrote a little python module to check for available extensions. I am changing some abstractions in order to make the menu code less horrible. I will be happy when pyCave runs on my Macbook and another dying 5 year-old laptop.

For now, If you are on a desktop computer with an Nvidia graphics card, you can get pycave from

http://pycave.sourceforge.net/index.php
(svn version is better ;)