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Python Multi-Media API (PMMA)
Welcome to the first ever major release of PMMA!
PMMA is a powerful API designed to help make the development of applications using the programming language Python easier and faster. PMMA is, by design, built to work in a variety of different applications, but also includes a lot of the tools commonly used in the game development industry.
PMMA includes standard support for efficient 2D and 3D pipelines using OpenGL and hardware acceleration in a variety of components as standard. Where the raw speed of hardware acceleration isn’t available, we will automatically transfer some components of PMMA over from Python to Cython for an additional increase in speed, but everything is wrapped up through Python, so it is super easy to use and compatible with most IDEs.
By default, PMMA is designed to be as fast as possible, but it has massively improved the efficiency of your Python application, far outstripping the efficiency of competing graphics APIs like Pygame and Pyglet in some environments*.
Features
* Bug-fix: Shapes now respond better to positioning and aspect ratio changes on display resizing.
* New feature: Rectangles now have a customisable border-radius.
* New feature: Added update checking to PMMA!
* Improvement: Massively accelerated the shape rendering process by around 60x in a worst-case scenario.
* Improvement: Brought number converters closer to their Cython representation, for performance improvement.
* Improvement: Shapes now check to see if their geometry is cached before creating it, for faster shape creation.
* Improvement: Significantly reduced the vertex count for shapes, by better approximating the number of vertexes based on the resolution of the window.
* Improvement: Significantly reduced the overall memory footprint of PMMA.
* Improvement: Cleaned-up and removed components of PMMA that need to be redesigned (images and text).
* Improvement: Significantly improved the way PMMA handles display resizing.
* Improvement: Numerous optimisations to Cython performance.
Features coming soon
Now that we have finished this major version of PMMA, we have begun to plan the next major update to PMMA and there are a lot of big changes and exciting new features on their way. Whilst not wanting to give away too much yet, we will begin to expand to include more complex 2D shapes. We also will begin to transition development from focusing on 2D objects to 3D objects. This will see the expansion of our existing shapes API to include support for 3D shapes. We will also start to look into mechanics like Physics, Collisions and Path Finding. Additionally, expect to also see some major improvements to shaders and the ability to load your own custom 3D models and finally the ability to load and use images and text, with the ability to also texture and add gradients to your 2D and 3D shapes! Exciting times ahead.
Documentation
The documentation for PMMA is something we are committed to and are going to begin working on following the release of this major version of PMMA. The documentation for PMMA can be found here: https://pmma.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Issues At Launch
There are a few problems with PMMA that exist at present, however these issues are largely minor and delaying PMMA's release and the introduction of new features to fix these problems seem unnecessary - they will be patched in a future release of PMMA.
* There are some issues with a limited number of real time effects, however the most common effects are unaffected by this issue.
* Perlin noise generation for arrays of any dimension and size isn't as user friendly as we would like. This does not effect the generation of a single Perlin noise value for a given number of dimensions.
Final Points
Hey! Did you spot something that doesn’t look right or could be better with the documentation? Let us know by raising it as an issue, or feel free to fork the project and improve the documentation yourself! If you spot a mistake or something we missed or should add to PMMA itself, please also feel free to raise it as an issue and we will work with you to pin down exactly what you're looking for so we can make PMMA better for you – or alternatively feel free to fork it and make the change yourself! PMMA is completely open source and any help is always appreciated!
*It’s important though, in mentioning PyGame that PMMA would not be possible without Pygame and the large community surrounding it, as Pygame first inspired me to make this project, and also provides a lot of the low-level references used in PMMA for things like window creation and event handling – so make sure to go and check out PyGame here: https://www.pygame.org/