RE: [pygame] Sprite rotation

["Todd Smith" <tcsmith@cs.utah.edu>]

Ya I noticed the AA rect issue and figured there would have to be some messy workarounds to do things correctly. 
Looks like PyOpenGL it is.

/todd

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pygame-users@seul.org [mailto:owner-pygame-users@seul.org] On Behalf Of Eric Burgess
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 1:46 AM
To: pygame-users@seul.org
Subject: Re: [pygame] Sprite rotation

Todd Smith wrote:

> how well does pygame (SDL) handle sprite rotation vs. pyopengl?

Not nearly as well.  In SDL, the rotation is done in software, versus pyopengl which uses your graphics hardware.  Also, SDL is tied
to the notion of an axis-aligned rectangle (the image rotates, but it still has to be contained inside a rectangle with horizontal
and vertical edges), so you have to concern yourself with resizing in order to avoid cropping the image.  Whereas with pyopengl, you
just rotate the textured quad and that's it.

On the other hand, you have to do a bit more legwork setting up your game to use OpenGL, but not much more.  Since almost everyone
has a 3D card these days, I would strongly recommend you take advantage of  it.  
The benefits in speed and graphical quality cannot be overstated--it's night and day.  Basically, you'll get all your graphics "for
free"--I'm talking rotation, scaling, and alpha blending.  Your only bottleneck will be Python itself.  SDL starts to have problems
just drawing the entire screen every frame...you have to mess with things like "dirty rectangle animation" to get decent
performance, and you can't have things like smooth scrolling or other effects that change the entire screen every frame.  Your
graphics card can handle 10,000 textured quads
(sprites) with full effects, drawing 60 times a second, without even breaking a sweat.  Pyopengl lets you tap that power.

-Eric