pygame 1.9.5 released into the wilds

[claudeb]

I've been waiting to post this here ever since joining Dreamwidth in December last year. After many months of work, the Pygame library has a new release, that paves the way to a bright future for people who use Python to make games. To quote the official announcement:

Every single source file has been heavily modified and moved in this release. Initial (source code only) support for SDL2 has been merged in. We also support compiling with SDL1 in the same code base, so the migration to pygame 2 is easier. pygame 2 will be released with SDL2 being the default backend when some remaining issues are ironed out. The 1.9.x releases will continue with SDL1 until then. Also, the C API of pygame is undergoing a transformation with lots of cleanups. Then there have been plenty of other cleanups all throughout the python code as well. There's still lots to clean up, but things should be significantly easier for people to contribute (👋 hello and thanks new contributors!). The documentation has been improved with better examples links, search functionality, and improved navigation. Support for older Macs, and newer Macs has been improved. The mask, midi, draw, and math modules have gotten lots of polish with rough edges removed.

Click through to read the thank-yous and detailed changelog. I'll add that the switch to SDL2 means future versions will be able to run on Android, and also have new features such as supporting multiple windows where possible. Other additions are being planned, that should make Pygame more useful than ever. Hopefully more popular too, wink, wink.