Re: [pygame] Drawing directly or loading images

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

Kai Weber wrote:
> for educational purposes (learning programming with pygame) I want to
> write my own version of PONG. I like to have an old style Pong version
> as I remember playing in my youth on TV screen.
>
> Can I use the drawing functions to have sprites for the bats and the
> ball or should I better use images for this purpose? If I draw the balls
> and bats I imagine I could scale those objects to match the screen
> resolution.
Classical Pong was of course all solid rectangles. This is a prime case 
for drawing directly to the screen. I would recommend the Surface.fill() 
method.

I would recommend creating offscreen Surfaces to represent the ball and 
bats. Then drawing these on the screen with the traditional 
Surface.blit() calls. This way if you later want to replace the graphics 
with image files, it will require almost no change to your game code.

To create these surfaces you would use functions like this.

    def get_bat_image():
        size = 25, 200
        color = 255, 255, 255
        bat = pygame.Surface(size)
        bat.fill(color)
        return bat

    def get_ball_image():
        size = 25, 25
        color = 255, 255, 255
        ball = pygame.Surface(size)
        ball.fill(color)
        return ball

Later on you can easily change the colors, sizes, or even load an image.