Lately I’ve been doing some work (I promise it is real work) with Battlefield 2. The server part of the game has a cut-down version of Python built in so that you can interact with it, modifying aspects of the game and reacting to events etc. More details on this can be found on this wiki.
Anyway, the Python version it uses is pretty old (2.3.4, current version is 2.5.2) and it’s had functionality cut, e.g. no threading support. For the work I’m doing I needed threading support and a few other things so wanted to swap out the version of Python for another – turns out this wasn’t obvious so here are the steps:
- Replace the Battlefield 2 Python library (e.g. ‘bf2/bin/ia-32/libdice_py.so’) with the version of your choice. I just linked to my locally installed version ‘/usr/lib/libpython2.5.so’.
- Replace the Python library path at runtime to use the new libraries, e.g. edit ‘bf2/python/bf2/__init__.py’ and putting the equivalent of ’sys.path = ['/usr/lib/python2.5/', '/usr/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload/', 'python', 'mods/bf2/python', 'admin']‘ after the ‘import sys’ line.
I do get the following warning at runtime: ’sys:1: RuntimeWarning: Python C API version mismatch for module host: This Python has API version 1013, module host has version 1012.’ but it doesn’t seem to cause any problems (so far!).