So at this point, I'm, I'm sure that you all feel like you know and love simple
GUI and it's become a good friend, right? And I also hope that you realize that the
simple in simple GUI is not meant to imply that you can only do simplistic
things with it, rather, it got a simpler interface than a more full featured
library would have. Okay? So when you install desktop Python you
are not going to want to take simple GUI and put it on your desktop.
You want to get one of these more full featured libraries and transition over
from the simple GUI to the more complex GUI packages.
And when you do that, you can start by just using the subsets
of these packages that are all related to simple GUI.
You can look at the simple GUI calls, look at these packages, and make similar
calls and do similar things. You'll just find that if you want, you
also have more capability that you have access to now, that you can make use of.
So what package do you use? Well, there are lots and lots of GUI
packages, okay? And, ask a Python programmer which
package to use and they will give you a definitive, you know, a very strong
reason why you should use one of the other often. Okay?
A lot of this comes down to your personal preference, what you're trying to do, and
your personal taste. Okay? So, I'm going to try and not be too
biased here and try and talk about what would be good for transitioning from
CodeSkulptor and simple GUI. Okay, so if I look on the Python page
here, they have about six or seven GUI libraries,
they list PyGtk and PyQt first. I would not recommend these if you are,
you know, a beginning programmer. This is your
first foray into this beyond CodeSkulptor and simple GUI. Those are a little bit
more difficult to get installed and get running and working and I don't think
that that's, that's the right first choice. Okay?
They might be correct, a good choice later. 'Kay?
The more simpler choices are Tkinter. TkInter is the traditional, you know,
user interface toolkit for Python. It comes with Python when you install it.
You get it, you're ready to go and you can start using it.
WxPython is a little bit better. It allows you to do much of the same things,
though. I'm not sure PyjamasDesktop is really the
right choice either in this first, for similar reasons for PyGtk and PyQt.
So, I think that if you're looking for the fastest path to getting started,
TkInter is probably it. You can add WxPython and try that out and
compare and contrast the two if you'd like.
Now, if your objective is to continue writing games, we've really hook you on
the whole fact that I can use Python to write games.
These might not be the best choice anyway. There are actually game libraries
that have been built for Python that do a lot of things that make building games
simpler. Okay?
And you'll see in the list here, this is going to be a long list, right?
And they're actually grouped. Lay.'
The first group is PyGame and related. So PyGame is probably one of the most
popular game libraries for Python. There are lots and lots and lots of games
built on PyGame. And this is not necessarily because
PyGame is the best, but PyGame is sort of old, tried, and
true, and stable, and it just works. Okay.
And is a very portable, works across platforms pretty well.
So the PyGame is a good choice to start with.
Okay? Because there will be lots of examples that you can find and you'll
have lots of, of guidance and, and stuff on the web that you can use to figure out
how to get your, your programs working in PyGame.
Okay? And there's also some derivatives here that, that make use of PyGame.
Alright? Now there are newer packages, so there's
Pyglet here. Pyglet,
okay, is more advance and it actually allows you to use OpenGL to render
things. OpenGL is the graphics library standard
basically that you use on your computer. You have to have good support for OpenGL
for this to work well. And Cocos2D I think is actually even a
little bit newer and maybe better than, than Pygelt is built on top of Pyglet and
so, these two are, are good choices as well.
I think they provide more features and capabilities than PyGame, maybe a little
more complicated to use and they require a little bit faster hardware, but that's
probably because you're going to get better results.
Okay? There's also PyOpenGL which is another
way to get that G, OpenGL these generally also make use of PyGame, as it says here.
Right? And so there's a bunch of different
packages here. I think that I'd probably recommend
starting with PyGame. Like I said, it's going to be the sort of
easiest to get into. You're going to be able to find a lots of
material to help you out. And, once you become comfortable with
that, you know, if you want to transition into something
else, something more complicated,
I think that's fine as well, obviously. Now, I also want to stress that a lot of
this stuff, if you look at what your classmates have
already done, you can go look in the forums.
You will be able to find lots of, of posts where people have already started
to transition their programs over from simple GUI to PyGame or simple GUI to
TkInter. And, so, you can already get a feel for what it takes to translate.
And I think, a lot of the cases, you'll see that by simply using calls that are
similar to the simple GUI calls, you don't have to learn all that much
that's, that's new. You just have to learn a little bit
different names of the function calls or, or whatever.
And you will also see that the [INAUDIBLE] programming model that we
taught you will carry over nicely and the skills that you learned in this course
are going to be very relevant here. Okay?