Re: [pygame] shapes other than rects?

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Chris Armstrong wrote:

>I'd like to be able to have shapes other than rectangles in my game,
>preferrably with the same functionality as rects (collision detection, etc).
>Does anyone have any advice for me for creating such things? I realize
>creating a base rect-like object would be quite processor intensive for
>lots of calculations... I'm open to ideas. Thanks.

Maybe you could use a few smaller rects to approximate the shape you have?
Instead of having one big rect that contains the whole weird shape, have a
few smaller ones that contain it too. So, for a shape like this:

    ***
    ***
    *********
    *********

you would *not* have a rect like this:

   +--------+
   |        |
   |        |
   +--------+

but intstead a large one as normal that contains the blittable shape,
but two smaller ones for the collision detection:

   +-+
   | | 
   +-+------+
   +--------+

This would make the collision detection a two-step process, but as you
still use rects it should be quite fast. This has not been tested
though...

--------------------+--------------------------------------------------------
Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |     Balrog New Media    http://www.balrog.fi/
   Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, nobody hears your screams

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