NodeBox for OpenGL

NodeBox for OpenGL (NOGL) is a Python module for creating 2D interactive visuals using OpenGL. It is based on the command set of the classic NodeBox for Mac OS X (http://nodebox.net). It has support for Bezier paths, text, image filters (blur, bloom, ...), offscreen rendering, animation & motion tweening, and simple 2D physics. Its purpose is to implement a small game engine for "City In A Bottle" (http://cityinabottle.org).

VERSION

1.7

LICENSE

BSD, see LICENSE.txt for further details.

REQUIREMENTS

NodeBox for OpenGL is built on the excellent Pyglet module. It works on all platforms if you have Python and Pyglet installed. Note: on Mac OS 10.5, Python is already installed. On Mac OS X 10.6+ (Snow Leopard), you need to install a 32-bit version of Python (Pyglet won't work as expected with the preinstalled 64-bit version).

• Python 2.5-6 : an installer can be downloaded from http://www.python.org/download/
• Pyglet 1.4+ : an installer can be downloaded from http://www.pyglet.org/

Your video hardware needs support for OpenGL 2.0. If this is not the case, try updating to a new driver.

INSTALLATION

If you have pip, you can automatically download and install from the PyPi repository:

pip install nodebox-opengl

If that doesn't work, download the latest version manually. To be able to import NodeBox in your scripts, Python needs to know where the module is located. There are three basic ways to accomplish this:

• Put the nodebox/ folder in the same folder as your script.
• Put the nodebox/ folder in the standard location for modules so it is available to all scripts. The standard location depends on your operating system, for example: /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/ on Mac, /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ on Unix, c:\python25\Lib\site-packages\ on Windows.
• In your script, add the location of NodeBox to sys.path, before importing it:

  MODULE = '/users/tom/python/nodebox' import sys; if MODULE not in sys.path: sys.path.append(MODULE) import nodebox

If you get an "import pyglet" error, make sure that Pyglet is installed in site-packages/ too.

Binaries: NOGL contains C extensions for faster mathematics. If you want to activate them, you need to compile them from source. From the command line, do:

cd nodebox/ext python setup.py

USAGE

• For users coming from NodeBox for Mac OS X: this NodeBox for OpenGL does not have a built-in code editor. You can use the IDLE editor bundled with Python. On Mac OS X, we prefer TextMate (http://macromates.com).
• From the command line, you can run a script with: python example.py (or command-R in TextMate)
• This will open an application window with the output of your script.

Here is a simple NodeBox script:

from nodebox.graphics import * def draw(canvas): canvas.clear() translate(250, 250) rotate(canvas.frame) rect(x=-50, y=-50, width=100, height=100) canvas.size = 500, 500 canvas.run(draw)

It imports the nodebox.graphics module with the standard set of drawing commands. It defines a draw() function and attaches it to the canvas, so that it will be drawn each animation frame. It opens the main application window with canvas.run().

DOCUMENTATION

http://cityinabottle.org/nodebox

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Author:

• Tom De Smedt ([email protected])

Contributing authors:

• Frederik De Bleser
• Lieven Menschaert
• Giorgio Olivero

Contributors:

• Karsten Wolf
• Tuk Bredsdorff

City In A Bottle:

• Nicolas Marinus
• Ludivine Lechat
• Tim Vets
• Frederik De Bleser
• Tom De Smedt

Copyright (c) 2008-2012 City In A Bottle