So, it’s been a crazy quarter here at UCLA – general education really is a giant time sink. Thankfully, that’ll be done after this quarter and I’ll hopefully have more time to do inane side projects like the one I’m going to talk about today.
Everyone knows about Pong – the little game that you all played on your TI-83 in high school when you were supposed to be paying attention in math class. Along with all the other games you played on your calculator – I’m hoping to play with those later. Anyway. I’ve always had an interest in 3D graphics and how they relate to games. I did some dabbling in OpenGL last summer and it was painful to say the least. I’ve also been dabbling with Python lately, so the next obvious step was to figure out how to do graphics in Python. There a lot of libraries to do this (pygame comes to mind), but I decided to use VPython. It provides all sorts of nice little things – namely the code to construct a shape.
from visual import * square = box( pos = (0, 0, 0), size = (3, 3, 3), color = color.green)
Nice. You can give the box a velocity by doing something like:
box.velocity = vector( 5, 0, 0 )
Then you can update the position of the box accordingly using your basic physical relationships. You know, Vf = Vi + at, and all the other stuff you learned in physics. Unless you took Physics 1A with Professor Corbin at UCLA, in which case you learned all sorts of other cool stuff and aren’t sure how you passed the class. But I digress.
I started this project just trying to learn how VPython works, and I ended up implementing a version of Pong that is playable, but slightly boring. There is no score display, end-of-game info is displayed in the console, and there is no vector math implemented. Therefore, the ball always bounces at a 45 degree angle from the wall or the paddle. This is both unrealistic and boring. I’m no mathematician, and I don’t currently have the time to implement the vector math. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. If you do end up implementing it, please let me know. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, I just have finals coming up in the next week so it’s low on the priority list.
Anyway. That’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’m working off and on on doing a Tetris clone, and I’ll probably eventually get to Space Invaders. Maybe not with this library though. I’ll probably pick up something else (maybe a new language). Maybe I’ll go back to OpenGL or DirectX if I’m bored enough (and in a slightly masochistic mood). For those who are interested, the code is uploaded here. Comments and edits appreciated. Thanks for reading!
