Pygame slow or just programmers are inefficient?
 

Why are all of the Pygame games so slow? Even a simple platform-hopping game moves like a snail. Other enourmously more complicated games, not Python in origin, don't seem to have such a problem on the same hardware.

Is it that the programmers are (just like me), too inexperienced? Or can I just not expect to get good performance from Pygame?

Are you sure that Pygame is the problem here? I really enjoy a Pygame-based game called 20000 Light Years into Space, and I have never had seen any performance problems. Perhaps there are graphical/resource issues on the computer you are playing on.
http://indicium.us/cgi-bin/pages/get...ung-lightyears

Also, your profile says you are running Debian: how recent is your version of Pygame? As you can see, there has been something like three new releases in the last two years:

http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

I never thought to check that. I'm running Debian 5 now, so I've got Pygame 1.7.1, from 2005. So old. If I download the lates version of Pygame, can it run with the Python that came with Debian 5 (Python 2.5.2-3), or do I need to upgrade Python and Pygame together?

Python == Very, Very, Very slow.http://www.google.com/search?q=pytho...GLL_en___US368

Python is not one of my stronger languages, but I don't see how that would be a problem. I think you would just have to make sure your module search path was getting to the new Pygame rather than the old one. From a quick google search:

http://linuxtopia.org/online_books/p...on_tut_47.html

Of course, I don't know how much having an old version of python affects performance, either.

I would continue to keep the graphical performance issue in the back of your mind as well. What kind of graphics card do you have? Are drivers properly installed? etc.

2.6.4

It certainly can be slow, depends on the game. It's certainly slow compared to games written in C/C++. If they manage to use OpenGL and you have a good video card it will be just about as fast as C.