Using Pygame to make scrolling shoot-em-up

Question

I'm starting to work on a 2D scrolling shoot-em-up game, and I was wondering if pygame is suitable. I would like to hit close to 60 fps while animating a scrolling background with hundreds of sprites (mostly bullets, of course); is this feasible with pygame? From what I've read, I'm leaning toward no, but I'd like another opinion from someone with more experience with pygame.

I'm also looking at using PyOpenGL with pygame, but I have absolutely no experience with OpenGL. Will OpenGL work better in this case than native pygame graphics, and are there any good tutorials for OpenGL/PyOpenGL/using PyOpenGL with pygame?

Answer 1

Pygame is as good as they get for 2D CPU graphics. All the graphics is implemented in C, (PyGame wraps SDL) so the code is nearly as fast as an equivalent C software renderer.

That said, it's still (basically) a software renderer, and there's this interesting device in every modern computer called a GPU which is designed to do that. PyOpenGL/OpenGL will take advantage of it, so yes, absolutely PyOpenGL will render faster than PyGame.

Bottom line:

PyGame is fast, but not as fast as PyOpenGL. For hundreds of onscreen sprites, that will mainly be a logic problem (Python logic is slow, even by interpreted language standards). Rewriting it in SDL would make it faster (because C/C++ is faster than Python). You could also use PyOpenGL, which I predict in this case would improve performance significantly, though not dramatically (but it's much harder to use).

Like I said, though, it will be primarily a logic issue, I think. There is something to be said for using PyOpenGL, but as they say, the greatest optimization you will ever make is when your code works for the first time.

Answer 2

Pygame is the best solution for 2D games in python according to me. You can save Surfaces uses its optimized Sprites animation, so I think it's the fastest solution : as for development process than for code execution.