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3.9: Surface Objects and The Window

  • Page ID
    14417
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    Surface objects are objects that represent a rectangular 2D image. The pixels of the Surface object can be changed by calling the Pygame drawing functions (described later in this chapter) and then displayed on the screen. The window border, title bar, and buttons are not part of the display Surface object.

    In particular, the Surface object returned by pygame.display.set_mode() is called the display Surface. Anything that is drawn on the display Surface object will be displayed on the window when the pygame.display.update() function is called. It is a lot faster to draw on a Surface object (which only exists in the computer’s memory) than it is to draw a Surface object to the computer screen. Computer memory is much faster to change than pixels on a monitor.

    Often your program will draw several different things to a Surface object. Once you are done drawing everything on the display Surface object for this iteration of the game loop (called a frame, just like a still image on a paused DVD is called) on a Surface object, it can be drawn to the screen. The computer can draw frames very quickly, and our programs will often run around 30 frames per second (that is, 30 FPS). This is called the "frame rate" and is explained later in this chapter.

    Drawing on Surface objects will be covered in the "Primitive Drawing Functions" and "Drawing Images" sections later this chapter.


    This page titled 3.9: Surface Objects and The Window is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Al Sweigart via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.