display window to the attribute self.
screen, so it will be available in all meth-
ods in the class.
The object we assigned to [Link] is called a surface. A surface in
Pygame is a part of the screen where a game element can be displayed. Each
element in the game, like an alien or a ship, is its own surface. The surface
returned by display.set_mode() represents the entire game window. When we
activate the game’s animation loop, this surface will be redrawn on every
pass through the loop, so it can be updated with any changes triggered by
user input.
The game is controlled by the run_game() method. This method contains
a while loop 3 that runs continually. The while loop contains an event loop
and code that manages screen updates. An event is an action that the user per-
forms while playing the game, such as pressing a key or moving the mouse. To
make our program respond to events, we write an event loop to listen for events
and perform appropriate tasks depending on the kinds of events that occur.
The for loop 4 nested inside the while loop is an event loop.
To access the events that Pygame detects, we’ll use the [Link]()
function. This function returns a list of events that have taken place since
the last time this function was called. Any keyboard or mouse event will
cause this for loop to run. Inside the loop, we’ll write a series of if state-
ments to detect and respond to specific events. For example, when the
player clicks the game window’s close button, a [Link] event is detected
and we call [Link]() to exit the game 5.
The call to [Link]() 6 tells Pygame to make the most
recently drawn screen visible. In this case, it simply draws an empty screen
on each pass through the while loop, erasing the old screen so only the new
screen is visible. When we move the game elements around, [Link]
.flip() continually updates the display to show the new positions of game
elements and hide the old ones, creating the illusion of smooth movement.
At the end of the file, we create an instance of the game and then call
run_game(). We place run_game() in an if block that only runs if the file is
called directly. When you run this alien_invasion.py file, you should see an
empty Pygame window.
Controlling the Frame Rate
Ideally, games should run at the same speed, or frame rate, on all systems.
Controlling the frame rate of a game that can run on multiple systems is
a complex issue, but Pygame offers a relatively simple way to accomplish
this goal. We’ll make a clock, and ensure the clock ticks once on each pass
through the main loop. Anytime the loop processes faster than the rate we
define, Pygame will calculate the correct amount of time to pause so that
the game runs at a consistent rate.
We’ll define the clock in the __init__() method:
alien_invasion.py def __init__(self):
"""Initialize the game, and create game resources."""
[Link]()
230 Chapter 12