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Re: [pygame] [Announce] Python bindings for the bitmask collision detection library
Hi.
Bitmask as a separate module is a good idea. I think your pygame.mask
is a good name. Then we can provide some pygame.sprite mixins, or
methods to help there.
- pygame.mask module.
- move docs from the source to .doc file.
- some unittests in the test/ directory.
Ok, I can do this.
- move your pygame example to examples/bitmask.py or maybe...
bouncy_bitmask.py ?
Sure, no problem. I have not even looked at the pygame source tree, so
I don't know how you organize stuff. I will have a look.
I'm not sure about a surface method. It might simplify things for
some people though. However then it makes surface depend on the
bitmask module (not necessarily bad).
It is more complicated, but I can imagine it makes it easier to use
for beginners. Anyway, I cannot really help with this part so I leave
it up to you guys.
Has it been tested on big endian machines? eg ppc macs? It looks to
have checks in there for 64bit machines - has it been tested on 64bit
machines too?
Yes. The library is used in my game 'Airstrike', which has been tested
on a lot of platforms: sparc, ppc, i386 and even some old amiga
platform. So I think it works. I develop on ppc and i386.
'maskFromSurface' might be a constructor argument? This would be so
common, that we should do our own implementation.
Yes. It is also much faster in C than in Python. I can't really think
of a good set of arguments to the constructor that allows for either
(width,height) or a surface, though.
Do you think it
would be very different for different games? eg, using different
alpha levels as 'empty'. 5% alpha might be considered to be gone by
some games/sprites. If you think that's useful, an alpha_threshold
argument might be appropriate.
I think it's a good idea. It can default to 50%.
As you suggest, there's lots of other uses for bitmasks, other than collision.
Blitting surfaces masked with a bitmask might be a future application.
Another future application might be to reduce over draw - by using
the bitmask to show which pixels we have updated.
A mask.setrange() method might be useful. So you can set a range of
bits at once, quickly.
Perhaps this can wait until the next release, I think collision
detection is the main feature, and it may seem overly complicated if
we add a lot of extra functions. But again, I think you can decide
this best.
I will start working on this and try to be on irc next wednesday.
Regards,
UIf