Re: [pygame] Struggling with mouse input

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

Dave Mikesell wrote:
> Pygame newbie here.  I'm writing what could be considered an
> Asteroids-type clone (actually, it's an Odyssey II UFO! clone but nobody
> probably remembers OII) and want to turn my ship using the mouse.  Is
> there a standard way to do this, or perhaps a sample I could look at? 
> Basically, I'm catching MOUSEMOTION events and comparing the X values from
> the current and previous frames to determine which direction to turn.
>
> So I guess what I am asking is, what are best practices for moving a
> player/object using the mouse?

There should be nothing inherently jerky with the mouse motion. But it 
is hard to guess what is causing the trouble. I would suspect the 
drawing of the ship, but it sounds like you have a working case with the 
keyboard.

Inside your event handling code you shouldn't need much more than this.

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.MOUSEMOTION:
            shipAngle += event.rel[0] * 0.5

Then when you render just apply the appropriate shipAngle rotation.