Visualizer Art Direction
##Visualizer/Art Direction While it was initially suggested that the visualizer use the XNA framework and be written in C#, this is not an acceptable solution since participants will need to be able to run the visualizer on their development machines and may not be working on Windows.
Another suggestion would be to use OpenGL through Python for the visualizer; this would be cross platform and use the same programming language as the rest of the Mechmania project. OpenGL is extremely powerful, but since the visualizer will likely only use 2D features it would be beneficial to use the pyglet library to streamline the development; pyglet appears to be well documented here
Pyglet can be installed on the EWS linux machines with the following command:
easy_install -U --install-dir=~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/ pyglet
The assets for the visualizer are from the unreleased game Hard Vacuum whose assets have since been made available for free. The assets and more info about the game can be found on the Lost Garden blog.