Spring 2020 Release: PySDL

And we’re back! After a bit of a hiatus, the team has a new release for you. There’s two significant things to talk about: dramatic optimizations of the event dispatch, and replacing PyGame with PySDL2. This also allows Python 3.8!

First, the simple one: event dispatch performance was dramatically optimized, because the performance of the previous method was just bad.

The big thing is that PursuedPyBear no longer depends on PyGame and uses PySDL2 instead. This was done because PyGame has never supported Python 3.8 in a final release, despite 3.8.0 being released in October, 2019. We are now using PySDL2 instead. This should require no changes from our uses, although Linux uses will require additional steps to install the SDL libraries (see the installation instructions).

Additionally, a pass was made at improving the docs: Double checking the accuracy of existing documentation, adding detailed documentation to ppb.engine.GameEngine and adding our first discussion pages. One discussing the design and constraints of the Asset system and another outlining the principles of ppb as a project.

We anticipate this release to have no impact on the vast majority of users, and minimal impact on the rest.

The detailed changelog can be found in the GitHub Release.