Pygame creating surfaces

Question

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import pygame, time, sys, random, os
from pygame.locals import *
from time import gmtime, strftime

pygame.init()

w = 640
h = 400

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((w, h),RESIZABLE)
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
x = y = 100

def starting():
    basicfont = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 48)
    text = basicfont.render('Starting...', True, (255, 255, 255), (0, 0, 255))
    textrect = text.get_rect()
    textrect.centerx = screen.get_rect().centerx
    textrect.centery = screen.get_rect().centery
    screen.fill((0, 0, 255))
    screen.blit(text, textrect)

def taskbar():
    basicfont = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 24)
    taskbarrect = pygame.Rect((0, int(h-40)), (int(w), int(h)))
    text = basicfont.render(strftime("%Y-%m-%d", gmtime()), True, (0, 0, 0))
    text2 = basicfont.render(strftime("%H:%M:%S", gmtime()), True, (0, 0, 0))
    taskbarrect.blit(text, (w - 100, h - 37))
    taskbarrect.blit(text2, (w - 100, h - 17))
    pygame.display.update()

starting()
screen.fill((255,255,255))

while 1:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            sys.exit()  
        elif event.type==VIDEORESIZE:
            w = event.dict['size'][0]
            h = event.dict['size'][1]
            screen=pygame.display.set_mode(event.dict['size'],RESIZABLE)
    taskbar()

Because I want to make my code run faster, I want to create surfaces and blit rects on top of them, so that I can do pygame.display.update(taskbarrect) and speed up my code. However, I don't know how to create multiple surfaces. I have tried taskbarrect=(xcoordinate, ycoordinate, width, length) then blitting an image or text or whatever, but trying it says tuple object has no attribute blit. Trying the method in the code (suggested by @elegent) gives 'pygame.Rect' object has no attribute 'blit'.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Pygame uses surfaces to represent any form of image. This could be either

• your main screen Surface, which is returned by the pygame.display.set_mode() function

  myDisplay = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 300))
  

• or created object of the pygame.Surface class:

  #create a new Surface
  myNewSurface = Surface((500, 300))
  
  #change its background color
  myNewSurface.fill((55,155,255))
  
  #blit myNewSurface onto the main screen at the position (0, 0)
  myDisplay.blit(myNewSurface, (0, 0))
  
  #update the screen to display the changes
  display.update() #or  display.flip()
  

Pygame's display.update() has a method that allows one to update only some portions of the screen by passing one object or a list of pygame.Rect objects to it. Therefore, we could also call:

myUpdateRect= pygame.Rect((500, 300), (0, 0))
display.update(myUpdateRect)

Anyway, I recommend to using the pygame.draw module to draw simple shapes like rectangles, circles and polygons onto a surface, because all of these functions return a rectangle representing the bounding area of changed pixels.

This enables you to pass this information to the update() function, so Pygame only updates the pixels of the just drawn shapes:

myDisplay = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 300))

myRect= pygame.Rect((100, 200), (50, 100))
pygame.display.update(pygame.draw.rect(myDisplay, (55, 155, 255), myRect))

Update:

def taskbar():
    basicfont = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 24)

    text = basicfont.render(strftime("%Y-%m-%d", gmtime()), True, (0, 0, 0))
    text2 = basicfont.render(strftime("%H:%M:%S", gmtime()), True, (0, 0, 0))

    screen.fill((55, 155, 255))

    screen.blit(text, (w - 100, h - 37))
    screen.blit(text2, (w - 100, h - 17))

    pygame.display.update()

Hope this helps :)