Python bindings, anyone?

ajdlinux · Post by **ajdlinux** » Sun Jul 30, 2006 9:23 am

Has anyone made a Python binding for Irrlicht? I know of Venom, however it switched to NeoEngine and Lua instead of Irrlicht and Python.

ThommyE · Post by **ThommyE** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 11:28 am

dunno, i'm intrested in python myself. just stared to learn it but it seems do be dead-simple. since python bindings are available for a lot of other stuff it might be preety usefull. i'm currently messing around with panda3d since i'm not skilled enough to put my own game-framework together with c++.
python binding would be definetly nice (i somehow have the feeling that it already exists somewhere out there)

stodge · Post by **stodge** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 12:06 pm

There aren't any Python bindings that I'm aware of. Venom wasn't true bindings anway - it bound a higher level application, not the Irrlicht API. Do a search.

I doubt the IrrLua bingins could be re-used for Python.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 12:26 pm

I thought Venom was a SWIG generated binding?! At least SWIG would be a way to easily get the bindings.

stodge · Post by **stodge** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 1:14 pm

IrrLua is SWIG? That would/should make it easy (easier) to create Pything bindings methinks.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 4:10 pm

I said Venom, not IrrLua. Don't know about IrrLua.

stodge · Post by **stodge** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 5:15 pm

hybrid wrote: I said Venom, not IrrLua. Don't know about IrrLua.

Doh! Sorry - misread your post.

anoki · Post by **anoki** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 9:46 pm

The venom project for irrlicht is working very well and it is
pretty simple. It is just not yet for irrlicht 1.0 ...
At the moment it is using 0.14 ...

Maybe somebody should update it to 1.0 and it would be
really great. Even the speed is very fast.

AndyCR · Post by **AndyCR** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 12:42 am

I am working on a 'python binding' for irrlicht as we speak - it is actually a highly scriptable game engine that happens to use Irrlicht. It is not ready for release yet, so I cannot give you it (and if I could it would likely at it's current stage be far too limited to be useful). You can see it in action here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3OS1piSPv64 The menu, the loading of the INI files, etc. in that video is done in Python. (Note: I sound like an idiot in that video, and mix up some stuff. I'm just not used to being on video, I normally do not make those mistakes...)

Let me say that Python scripting + Irrlicht = some easy yet extremely powerful stuff.

pinballwizard · Post by **pinballwizard** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 1:59 am

anoki wrote:The venom project for irrlicht is working very well and it is
pretty simple. It is just not yet for irrlicht 1.0 ...
At the moment it is using 0.14 ...

Maybe somebody should update it to 1.0 and it would be
really great. Even the speed is very fast.

Quick poll to interested parties...

1. Are you interested in USING Venom?
2. Are you interested in helping PROGRAMMING and MAINTAINING Venom to keep up with new Irrlicht releases?
3. Venom bindings are based on a custom binding language (like SWIG but simpler). Is this a good idea? Should we try to migrate to bindings using SWIG or other binding tools?

Me: 1 Yes, 2 Yes, 3 Dunno.

Just trying to gauge interest here - I can probably update Venom to Irrlicht 1.0 but I can't maintain it in the future by myself... it would be good if we could build up a community of users and maintainers (seeing as how the original author has apparently moved on to other projects).

pinballwizard · Post by **pinballwizard** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 2:00 am

stodge wrote:IrrLua is SWIG? That would/should make it easy (easier) to create Pything bindings methinks.

IrrLua looks like it uses tolua++ for bindings, not SWIG. Is this right? I guess tolua++ bindings wouldn't help making Python bindings. It may be best just to start with Venom.

spock · Post by **spock** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 3:56 am

you could also just use ironpython + irrlicht.net.

pinballwizard · Post by **pinballwizard** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 5:55 am

spock wrote:you could also just use ironpython + irrlicht.net.

Since I'm primarily a Linux/Mac guy, I prefer to steer clear of the whole .NET stuff - it would introduce more dependencies and complexity on Linux/Mac and probably wouldn't be very stable. Pure Python/C++ (like Venom) is a cleaner solution IMHO.

justinian · Post by **justinian** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 9:18 pm

I recently started work on a SWIG python binding for Irrlicht, for my own uses. If anyone's interested, let me know.. there's not too much there so far, but it at least runs the basic model-loading example.

This is a direct wrapping of the Irrlicht API for Python, not a framework or other engine with Python bindings. I'm aiming to make it pythonic at least on a basic level (eg, being able to pass a tuple of ints for a vector2d<s32>, etc) but not so far as pyOgre went with things (eg, making set/get methods into properties, straying from the C++ API to make it more pythonic..).

If anyone else has gotten further than I have on something similar, I'd also love to see what they've got!

zenaku · Post by **zenaku** » Sat Aug 05, 2006 2:19 am

anoki wrote:The venom project for irrlicht is working very well and it is
pretty simple. It is just not yet for irrlicht 1.0 ...
At the moment it is using 0.14 ...

Maybe somebody should update it to 1.0 and it would be
really great. Even the speed is very fast.

If you can get venom built, porting from irrlicht-0.14.0 to irrlicht 1.0 shouldn't be very hard. You only need to care about what interfaces have changed, and not much has between 0.14.0 and 1.0, IMO.

Porting IrrLua from 0.14.0 to 1.0 took about 20 minutes using WinDiff on the include directories. Porting to Lua 5.1, tolua++1.0.92 and figuring out the D3D_CREATE_FPU_PRESERVE problem took a lot longer

.

If I had known about SWIG when I started IrrLua I probably would have used that and not tolua++. I have to admit tolua++ works pretty well with Irrlicht's design, although it's not without some serious bugs. I had to butcher the header files quite a bit to make them into tolua++ pkg files that work.