[pygame] Two questions regarding a simple space shooter

["Kai Kuehne" <kai.kuehne@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi list. :)
Wanted to start programming with pygame while making a pacman-clone.
But that's to hard. Now I'm creating a simple scroll-shooter with a ship
sitting on a starfield and some enemy ships.

I have a question regarding the design of this space shooter.

I'm pondering how to handle the stars. For now, I just use
screen.set_at and "overdraw" the old star with the new one.

Dump question, i know.. but, is this commonly used this way?
Or would you prefer to make a "Star" class. I thought, this would
be - maybe - a little bit of overkill. :-)

Another question is how to handle the keyboard input.
I wanted to control the ship by the left and right arrow keys and
as long I press $the button, the ship shall fly into this direction. :-)

I have no code here, atm. But I try to remember what I've written:

The following code just do nothing (I thought this would do it):
while 1:
....
   pygame.event.pump()
   keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
   if K_LEFT in keys:
       ship.move_left()
...

When I print out 'keys', I see correct output since there is a 1 in the list.


This code works, but I have to press the direction several
times to make the ship fly (one press, one pixel):

while 1:
....
for event in pygame.event.get():
   if event.type == KEYDOWN:
       if event.key == K_LEFT:
           ship.move_left()
....


Thanks for you help!
Kai