Every 3d engine has it's own vocabulary for describing it's components, PySoy is no different. This page is a rosetta stone for the terms we use.

Core

Sprite: a 2d image rendered in 3d space as always facing the camera

Camera: an "observer" in 3d space

Mesh: a group of triangles with shared verticies which may be used one or more times in the same scene

Entity: a single instance of a mesh with a position, mass, potential collision shape, etc (inherits soy.physics.Body)

Particles: a group of animated sprites used to achieve various effects

Widgets

These are 2d objects which are rendered to the window itself rather than inside 3d space.

Projector: canvas for rendering a 3d scene to, attaches to a soy.Camera

Label: rendered text Image: a simple image

Physics

Most of these terms come from ODE. They should only appear in the soy.physics submodule.

World: a container in 3d space which bodies/shapes/joints can be placed into with only interact with each other

Shape: a collision 'bubble' around a body often approximating the dimensions of the object the body's attached to (Geom in ODE)

Joint: a connection between two bodies which constrains their movement in respect to each other

Animation

Morph: a set of alternative vertex positions which a mesh may be transformed to on a gradient

Bone: an axis which effects one or more verticies in a body

Audio

Sound: a single-channel waveform, often only a few seconds in length, which is attached to a widget or body (.soy format)

Music: a file or network-streamed waveform, typically stereo channel, played without 3d transformations (Ogg Vorbis format)