When comparing pygame vs Oxygine, the Slant community recommends pygame for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” pygame is ranked 16th while Oxygine is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose pygame is:
Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy Python syntax
Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners.
Pro Very easy to understand
The API is very straightforward.
Pro Good canvas system
Pygame has a drawing system that allows the user to create and draw on an unlimited number of canvases.
Pro Games can be built as HTML5 applications
Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS.
Pro Functionality can be extended with a bunch of available extenions
All of them available publicly at github.
- oxygine-movie for playing Theora movies with alpha channel
- oxygine-sound player for ogg sound/music with streaming
- oxygine-freetype library
- oxygine-billing for in-app-purchases on Android/iOS
- oxygine-spine for playing Spine animations
- oxygine-magicparticles for playing particles made with MagicParticles
Pro Will be familiar to users of ActionScript3/Flash API
If you are familiar with ActionScript3/Flash API, then you will find it easy to begin working in Oxygine. Oxygine is much like Flash in C++, as its Event Handling model is very close to that of ActionScript 3 and SceneGraph.
Pro Easy to use C++ API with optional C++11 features
Oxygine is written in C++. It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates.
Pro Free, open source and cross-platform
Oxygine is a free framework that works on OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5. It's licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Robust
It's very rare to experience bugs with Oxygine.
Pro Allows playing movies with alpha channel
Using oxygine-movie extension for Oxygine you could play in your game any videos encoded with Theora codec.
You movie could have alpha channel and used as simple sprite instead of classic spreadsheet animations.
Pro Allows for flexible contol over draw processes
Pro Fast
Cons
Con Deathly slow
Con Nonexistent community
No good forums, wiki, or other ways to reach other Pygame developers.
Con Very basic
Pretty much just a wrapper for SDL.
Con Pygame is a multimedia framework, not a game engine
Physics, AI and networking are not supported.
Con Messy documentation
The docs are messy, and some basic functions are infuriating to work out. There's even some places in the documentation where it's clearly wrong about how a method is called/what the arguments really do.
Con Outdated
Pygame uses a really old version of SDL and is missing some of the features developed for SDL2.
Con Hasn't been updated in years
Hasn't been updated in years.
Con Inactive
The project does not seem to be active: there has been no new commit since mid-2019, the Twitter feed for the engine stopped posting news in 2018, and the forum is offline as of May 2021.
Con Little community support
Oxygine is a young framework. It was first released in 2013 and has yet to gather a large community. As of February 2016, the forum had just 123 members.
Con Not many tutorials available
There are not many tutorials available that teach developers on how to make a game with Oxygine from scratch. Because of this, it may be harder to pick it up or to start learning game development by using this engine.