So I've recently had a stroke of insanity, deciding that what the open-source Quake III engine *really* needs is a good, healthy dose of Python.
Here's the quick version: The Q3 engine is split into the engine (responsible for rendering, sound, networking, input, and collision detection) and the game logic. Currently, the game logic can be loaded as a shared object file (usually for development) or this crazy thing called a QVM: a bytecode file which is either interpreted or JIT-compiled. Using ioquake3 (ioquake3.org) as a base, I added Python to the list. Frankly, I'm not amazed at how much easier it is to code game logic in Python, but some people might be. :D I'm working on the client game, and I'm about 30% done with that part. It looks like it's going to work out very well. It's the coolest thing to be able to pull down the console and type "/py print cg.data.pps.origin" and have it print out your current position. Now that the background is out of the way, I have two questions: 1) Is there a good guide for distributing applications with embedded Python? I'm planning (so far) on putting libpython2.4.so in the executable directory, along with everything from /usr/lib/python2.4 that the interpreter complains about not having. (I'll try to put them in a zip file - sans zipfile.py - if I possibly can.) Is there a nicer way to do this? 2) Is there any way to restrict Python modules from accessing files outside of a sandbox? One of the nice things about Quake 3's QVM files is that they are very, very restricted. They have no concept of a standard C library. This makes some things rather tricky, but also very secure: if the engine doesn't support it, you can't do it. If you download a Quake 3 mod from someone, you can be fairly sure it won't hose your system. In particular, it won't let you access files outside of the game directory. Is there a way I can accomplish something similar in an embedded Python application? I probably only have to make it secure on systems that don't have Python installed. Neil -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
