Re: [pygame] Is Pygame suitable for full HD games?

[Silver <rockachu2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/5/2012 6:23 AM, Luis Morcillo wrote:

> I finished the tiled background engine, and I've noticed a
> 15 fps drop in 1920x1080. And when I added a 5 planes parallax scroll,
> fps are going down to 10-20. I doubt it's the machine, as I play games
> like Starcraft in Ultra settings on it. Also, I'm noticing most games
> developed with Pygame are 640x480 or 800x600. So the question would
> be: is Pygame suitable for doing a full HD side-scrolling platformer?
> 
> My current approach is to render all scrolls planes and the tiled
> background to a single surface (the ".image" of my Stage class),
> instead of rendering each one in different planes. I haven't tried
> separating yet, but I doubt it will improve performance, as the
> blitting will be the same. Am I wrong?
> 
If you don't blit it directly to a HWSURFACE, then it will still be
software blitting and probably wont make much of a difference. Try
initiating your .image with the HWSURFACE flag, and see if it improves
speed.

I think you are blitting everything to a .image, then the .image to the
screen once, right?



> I've read the Surface.blit() function is somehow slow and shouldn't be
> overused, but I don't know another way of rendering images to the
> screen. I tried using flags "HWSURFACE | DOUBLEBUF | FULLSCREEN" and
> it increased 2-3 fps. Am I missing some other optimization or am I
> just using the wrong engine for an HD platformer?


Say, are you using per-pixel transparency?
I know for a fact that it slows pygame down a lot, so if you don't need
intermediate tranlucency (eg, fading) you could use colorkeys.

I know that per-pixel alphas are slow, because I ran a test at 1920x1080
and adding a fifth surface with per-pixel alpha dropped frames from ~ 30
to ~8 per second.

Using colorkeys gave me 200 fps w/ pygame.RLEACCEL.
Adding one surface w/ transparency dropped it to 60fps.

I can send the code if you wish.


I do have a higher-end system, so opengl will probably be a good idea.
I'd suggest looking into PyGL3Display, which works for me although I
have just started to try it out.

I hope I have been helpful to your efforts.