For more advanced 3-D animation needs, also see the support in the PIL extension
package for common animation and movie file formats such as FLI and MPEG. Other
third-party toolkits such as OpenGL, Blender, PyGame, Maya, and VPython provide
even higher-level graphics and animation toolkits. The PyOpenGL system also offers
Tk support for GUIs. See the PyPI websites for links or search the Web.
If you’re interest in gaming specifically, PyGame and other packages support game
development in Python, and other books and web resources focus on this topic. Al-
though Python is not widely used as the sole implementation language of graphics-
intensive game programs, it is used as both a prototyping and a scripting language for
such products.‡ When integrated with 3D graphics libraries, it can serve even broader
roles. See http://www.python.org for links to available extensions in this domain.
The End of the Tour
And that’s a wrap for our tour of the tkinter library. You've now seen all the core widgets
and tools previewed in Chapter 7 (flip back for a summary of territory covered on this
tour). For more details, watch for all of the tools introduced here to appear again in the
advanced GUI techniques in Chapter 10, the larger GUI examples in Chapter 11, and
the remainder of the book at large. To some extent, the last few chapters have laid the
groundwork needed to step up to the larger programs that follow.
Other Widgets and Options
I should point out, though, that this story is still not quite complete. Although we’ve
covered the entire basic tkinter widget arsenal and mastered GUI fundamentals along
the way, we’ve skipped a handful of newer and more advanced widgets introduced to
tkinter recently:
Spinbox
An Entry used to select among a set or range of values
LabelFrame
A Frame with a border and title around a group of items
PanedWindow
A geometry manager widget containing multiple widgets that can be resized by
moving separator lines with the mouse
‡ Perhaps most prominently today, the popular Eve Online game uses Python for scripting and much of the
functionality—both on the server and the client. It uses the Stackless Python implementation to boost
massively parallel multitasking responsiveness. Other notable game companies using Python include the
makers of Civilization IV, and the now-defunct Origin Systems (at last report, its game Ultima Online II was
to use Python for scripting its animation).
The End of the Tour | 595