iDevGames, one of the most renowned Mac game development company, announced the 3D Game Development Contest. Its a good opportunity for Python game developers to participate and compete with other game developers. Developers skills will be tested for creating 3D unique games in just 30 days!

Python is already being used by professional game developers in a number of popular commercial games, including the award winning Star Trek Bridge Commander , Freedom Force. Still C and C++ are the favorite languages for game development. lets see the advantages of Python, how Python can reduce your development time and improve your technical designs.

If you are a Python programmer, but dont know much about Python games development then pygame (pygame.org) is a good place to start for Python game development, pygame is a Python's Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) binding.

SDL is a open source cross platform tool. It is available for both Windows as well as Linux. Aside from games, SDL has been used to write mpeg players, a midi editor, and a paint program.
PyUI, a user interface library, can be used for both game development as well as other application development. It is written in pure Python and uses PyGame as its 2D renderer. PyOpenGL provides some 3D support, and the Python Image Library is used to generate some images.

Game Programming with Python is about building games using Python. It deals with general concepts of game development and specifics that apply when using Python for game development.

3D Game Programming with Python

A combination of C++ and Python code is used for most of the game programming because 3D programs written fully in python are slower than programs written fully in C++ however the combination of C++ and Python works lot better compared to programs written fully in C++ .

One layer of 3D graphics is implemented in C++ (it can be one standard open source engine), which communicate with Python code client through TCP sockets. Developer needs to create a server, that can communicate with a client and control 3D scene drawing. A client on the other hand, has
control only over other elements. Irrlicht Engine and Ogre Engine are used for Python binding, both are very good free open source C++ 3D game Engine with a Python binding.

3D Game Engines written for Python (Engines designed for Python from scratch.)

* Blender is a 3d game engine that uses python to make 3d games
* Soya is a 3d game engine with an easy to understand design. It's written in Pyrex programming language and uses Cal3d for animation and ODE for physics. Soya is available under the GPL license.
* Panda3D is a 3D game engine. Its a library written in C++ with Python bindings. Panda3D is designed in order to support a short learning curve and rapid development. This software is available for free download with source code under Panda3D Public License. Panda3D supports a lot of features: Procedural Geometry, Animated Texture, Render to texture, Track motion, fog, particle system, and many others.

iDevGames, home of the world’s most renowned Mac game development contests, and Over The Edge Entertainment, the masterminds behind the cutting-edge game technology Unity. iDevGames mission is to educate and motivate Mac game developers, as well as to attract new developers to
the Mac platform.

The 3DU Contest is sponsored by Over The Edge Entertainment (OTEE), makers of Unity. Unity is being used by game developers such as Codemasters and Freeverse, it is the Mac-based cutting-edge game development tool having technical features such as extensible shaders and full-screen effects, a highly optimized scripting engine supporting C#, Javascript and a dialect of Python.

To enter in this contest, simply request a free contest version of Unity Pro, the Mac-based cutting-edge game development tool.

Schedule:

* Start: November 22, 2006 (11:59 PM GMT)
* Application Deadline: December 18 (11:59 PM GMT)
* Game Entry Deadline: December 22, 2006 (11:59 PM GMT)
* The winner announcement date will be decided after the application deadline.

You can get all the information about this contest from 3DU Contest page.

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