What's new (heaps of things since 1.8.1): http://www.pygame.org/whatsnew.shtml

Summary of changes:
  - many, many fixes and improvements. The largest amount of changes has gone into this release than any other pygame release.
  - bug fixes for backwards compatibility issues introduced in pygame 1.8.x series. old games like solarwolf and libraries like PGU work again.
  - experimental camera webcam module (still in development).
  - experimental midi module based on portmidi and pyportmidi (99% complete).
  - experimental gfxdraw module based on SDL_gfx (including AA circles, textured polygons and other goodness).
  - python3, and python3.1 support mostly completed. Some modules still remain to be completed - but mostly it's working.
  - nokia mobile phone s60 support.
  - improved OSX support (dropped pyobjc dependency, improved installer, sysfont now works on OSX).
  - pygame.examples + pygame.tests included with pygame. This makes testing easier, and also makes learning pygame more fun and easy.
  - cleanup of examples, and addition of new examples.
  - new tools to aid in development of pygame itself, better compilation documentation.
  - py2app, and py2exe support improved.


Files are up on the download page.

The 15th Ludumdare 48hour-from-scratch-solo game development competition is coming to the webs near you.

Read the full announcement here:http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/07/23/ludum-dare-15-august-28th-30th-weekend/.

A new book was published recently which teaches people to program using python and pygame. 'It's written in language a 12-year-old can follow, but anyone who wants to learn how to program a computer can use it. Even adults.' If you want to find out more... Watch the interview with Warren Sande and Carter Sande - the father and son team who wrote the book. You can read a review by Guido van Rossum, or visit the Hello world website or blog. Congratulations to Warren Sande and Carter Sande for completing their book, and getting it published!

The date for the ninth PyWeek challenge has been set:

Sunday 30th August to Sunday 6th September (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC)

The PyWeek challenge invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Entries must be developed in Python, during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme chosen at the start of the challenge.

REGISTRATION IS NOT YET OPEN --

Registration will open one month before the start date. See the competition timetable and rules:
http://www.pyweek.org/9/

pgreloaded (Pygame2) is an ongoing rewrite of the Pygame multimedia and game framework. As Pygame, it's purpose is to make writing multimedia applications, such as games, with Python as easy as possible, while providing the developer a reliable and extensible programming interface. It features a modular and loosely coupled package and module layout and access to the most features of the libraries it wraps.

pgreloaded can be installed side-by-side with Pygame as it uses a different package namespace and thus will not cause any conflicts with another Pygame installation.

The source and documentation packages as well as prebuilt Win32 installers are available from http://code.google.com/p/pygame/downloads/list

This is an alpha release for testing purposes and not meant to be run in production environments. pgreloaded is not backwards compatible with pygame - and work on pygame is still continuing.