Re: [pygame] Pixel perfect collision detection sugestion

[Pete Shinners <pete@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 17:26 +1000, Rene Dudfield wrote:
> There may be a faster way with bitsets or RLE encoding.  However those
> are a bit(HAR HAR) more complicated.  So if we make it a HitMask
> object, and have the functions use those, then we can implement the
> bitset/rle stuff later.

This has already been written once in the SDL SCAM library. It was a
great old library that even had bindings to pygame itself. Unfortunately
the old site seems to be dead.

It was able to build as an optional pygame module, but still remain
independent from the pygame source.

The problem the author found was that in the situation where he was
colliding many-to-many objects, most of the time was spent in finding
which sprites to even try the pixel tests. There are good algorithms for
generating trees of "nearest neighbors" which may be of help here. The
SCAM author was starting to develop this sort of thing but it got very
complicated, and he never ported any of his "higher level collision"
stuff into the python binding. (mainly because I don't think he ever got
it working to his liking).

Hmm, a bit of internet sleuthing uncovereed this.
http://www.ifm.liu.se/~ulfek/projects/2d_Collision_Detection.html

This is the 'next generation' of the old Scam library. I assume it's a
little simpler and faster. Although I suspect it may not include the
python bindings? Downloading now.