hi,
I'm in irc now putting bitmask into pygame.
illume is my nick.
Cheers,
On 5/6/07, Ulf Ekström <uekstrom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> > Bitmask as a separate module is a good idea. I think your pygame.mask
> > is a good name. Then we can provide some pygame.sprite mixins, or
> > methods to help there.
> >
> > - pygame.mask module.
> > - move docs from the source to .doc file.
> > - some unittests in the test/ directory.
>
> Ok, I can do this.
>
> > - move your pygame example to examples/bitmask.py or maybe...
> > bouncy_bitmask.py ?
>
> Sure, no problem. I have not even looked at the pygame source tree, so
> I don't know how you organize stuff. I will have a look.
>
> > I'm not sure about a surface method. It might simplify things for
> > some people though. However then it makes surface depend on the
> > bitmask module (not necessarily bad).
>
> It is more complicated, but I can imagine it makes it easier to use
> for beginners. Anyway, I cannot really help with this part so I leave
> it up to you guys.
>
> > Has it been tested on big endian machines? eg ppc macs? It looks to
> > have checks in there for 64bit machines - has it been tested on 64bit
> > machines too?
>
> Yes. The library is used in my game 'Airstrike', which has been tested
> on a lot of platforms: sparc, ppc, i386 and even some old amiga
> platform. So I think it works. I develop on ppc and i386.
>
> > 'maskFromSurface' might be a constructor argument? This would be so
> > common, that we should do our own implementation.
>
> Yes. It is also much faster in C than in Python. I can't really think
> of a good set of arguments to the constructor that allows for either
> (width,height) or a surface, though.
>
> Do you think it
> > would be very different for different games? eg, using different
> > alpha levels as 'empty'. 5% alpha might be considered to be gone by
> > some games/sprites. If you think that's useful, an alpha_threshold
> > argument might be appropriate.
>
> I think it's a good idea. It can default to 50%.
>
> > As you suggest, there's lots of other uses for bitmasks, other than collision.
> >
> > Blitting surfaces masked with a bitmask might be a future application.
> > Another future application might be to reduce over draw - by using
> > the bitmask to show which pixels we have updated.
> >
> > A mask.setrange() method might be useful. So you can set a range of
> > bits at once, quickly.
>
> Perhaps this can wait until the next release, I think collision
> detection is the main feature, and it may seem overly complicated if
> we add a lot of extra functions. But again, I think you can decide
> this best.
>
> I will start working on this and try to be on irc next wednesday.
>
> Regards,
> UIf
>