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The portable game framework

Ever since I had seen GCompris, a children activity application, I always wanted to add modules that caters to the need of getting my son to learn while he plays games. GCompris supports a python interface for rapid board development. But one quip that I had was, GCompris is a Linux only application (though they have a commercial win32 port). Now, if I can find a framework that works both on the Linux as well as the windows platform, it would make great sense. Gcompris as of now only will restrict schools to the Linux OS (which is good, but most schools would probably be using Windows and getting them to change would prove difficult) would be good.

An alternative framework would be Java with it's great 2D API (no fancy 3D here to confuse the kids). Others would by SDL with C/C++ or pygame (which I read has performance issues on the windows front. Read childsplay). A new contender that I noticed was the Mono framework which sports a 2D API identical to the DotNet framework.

My immediate course of action would be to write a few python modules based on GCompris and see if I would be migrate it to another framewor later as GCompris currently has the framework where as mine is still vapoware. Plus, it also has good i18n capabilities with a library of digitized voice samples where a build-from-scratch approach would require a lot of work.

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