On 21 March 2017 at 12:27, Leif Theden <leif.the...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Students should be taught how textures work, where different memories
> reside, and that GPUs operate differently than a CPU. At this point I think
> everyone knows where I stand, so I'll just let it go, since my comments are
> not being taken seriously.


Leif, I don't think it's true that your comments aren't being taken
seriously.

I agree with you that pygame has suffered from a shortage of maintainer
time. But I take issue on a couple of other points:

1. I don't think it's realistic to teach all students about memory
hierarchies and the differences between GPUs and CPUs, while they're also
trying to learn lots of other concepts about how to build a game, and
possibly even learning to program. Those are topics people will need to
know about if they want to build games more seriously, but a lot of people
using pygame are not doing it to build big complex games.

2. As Ian explained, the kinds of games many people build with pygame
cannot easily be 'hardware accelerated', because they don't fit GPU work
patterns. But there are still a lot of fun and interesting things we can do
in CPU-based games! Pygame survives in a niche of people building simple
games which don't need great performance. If we can expand that niche,
great, but your plan sounds like jumping out of the niche and trying to
compete with other higher-performance frameworks, which doesn't sound like
a good idea to me.

Thomas

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