Like Charlie said: as long as you make sure you only have one call per
unique filename, then you will not have copies.
But you can make it easier on yourself, by writing a basic
texture/surface manager so that repeated calls only load the surface
once.
( If you don't want to use an id, you can remove that, and use
filename as the key. )
Source:
class TextureManager:
"""a very basic texture manager
members:
tex_list : a dict() using (k,v) pairs as ( id, pygame.Surface() )"""
def __init__(self):
self.tex_list = {}
def load_image(self, id, filename):
"""Loads image and returns it.
Doesn't load redundant images for same key."""
# don't load if already loaded
if not id in self.tex_list:
self.tex_list[id] = pygame.image.load(filename).convert_alpha ()
print "created new image for: %s" % id
return self.tex_list[id]
Usage: ( output from IDLE ):
t = TextureManager()
t.load_image("red", "red.png")
created new image for: red
<Surface(10x10x32 SW)>
t.load_image("red", "red.png")
<Surface(10x10x32 SW)>