Re: [pygame] drawing a mouse cursor

[Michael <mogmios@mlug.missouri.edu>]

Thanks, I asked on the channel and as directed there I rewrote most of 
my code to use sprites for the UI elements rather than just blitting 
images myself. A pain really but it'll allow me to animate those 
elements later which I was going to do anyway. The switch to sprites and 
some other cleanup I did while working at it seems to have done the 
trick. The cursor movement is reasonably smooth now and the program runs 
faster in general. All around an improvement.

> pygame does support changing the system cursor. you still are stuck 
> with a 'boring' black and white cursor, but it will be controlled by 
> the system.
>
> you can also pretty easily blit your own cursor image when you draw 
> the screen. it sounds like this is what you are doing. if the cursor 
> motion is jumpy i suspect it is because your framerate is low.
>
> getting the framerate up could be hard if you've already done your 
> optimizing stuff. if your time is spent rendering it will be tough. if 
> there are many computations being done you could break them up into 
> batches. perhaps checking every number of computations for more mouse 
> input. clearing and redrawing just that area should be pretty fast and 
> keep the mouse much smoother.