Android programming – drawing bitmaps in a game loopSeries: Setup, Menu, Drawing, non-Android, Working, Saving state
I will be talking about how to write Android programs that share code with non-Android programs. The program I will be writing is a simple game.
This time we’re writing a game loop and drawing images onto a Canvas using a SurfaceView:
Android programming – a menu using Activities and IntentsSeries: Setup, Menu, Drawing, non-Android, Working, Saving state
I will be talking about how to write Android programs that share code with non-Android programs. The program I will be writing is a simple game.
This time we’re making a simple menu structure:
Android programming – setting up Android StudioSeries: Setup, Menu, Drawing, non-Android, Working, Saving state
I will be talking about how to write Android programs that share code with non-Android programs. The program I will be writing is a simple game.
First, how to set up Android Studio:
My First Raspberry Pi Game – Part 12 – Scoring, done!Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Writing your first ever computer program on the Raspberry Pi.
Today, we finish!
Our game is almost done. All we need to do now is let you play several times, and give you a score at the end.
First, because we’re going to use it lots of times, we need to make the ready_screen function set its background colour properly. Open redgreen.py in LeafPad, and add a single line to the function ready_screen, making it look like this:
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def ready_screen():
screen.fill( pygame.Color( "black" ) )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Ready?", white, True )
pygame.display.flip()
Previously, ready_screen was always the first thing we did, so we got away with not drawing a background colour because it starts off plain black. Now, we need to do it.
Next, let’s do the really interesting part. We want to play the game several times, and whenever we want to do something several times, we need a loop. This time we’ll use a for loop, letting us go through a list of things. Scroll to the very bottom, and change the code to look like this:
# We start from here start() for i in range( 10 ): ready_screen() wait() shape() end()
The new lines are green above, and lines that haven’t changed except being indented by putting four spaces at the beginning are blue.
A for loop lets you run through a list of things, running the same code each time. A for loop always looks like for NAME in LIST where NAME is the name of a new variable, and LIST is a list of things. What we’ve done here is make a list of 10 numbers by calling the range function and giving it an argument of 10, and told Python to put the particular item of the list that we’re working on now into a variable called i.
So, the ready_screen, wait and shape functions will each get called 10 times. Each time they are called, i will be a different number. We’re not using i yet, so all that matters for the moment is that the code runs 10 times. Try it out by opening LXTerminal and typing ./redgreen.py, and you’ll see that you can play the game 10 times, and then it will finish.
Playing 10 times is all very well, but it’s not a lot of fun if I can’t see how well I’ve done at the end. Let’s keep track of our score.
We’ll award the player 1 point for every time they get it right, and no points if they get it wrong. The places where we know which of these has happened are in red_shape and green_shape. Let’s change them to pass back a score (either 1 or 0) depending on what you did:
def green_shape():
...the rest of green_shape is still here...
pressed = shape_wait()
if pressed:
green_success()
return 1
else:
green_failure()
return 0
def red_shape():
...the rest of green_shape is still here...
pressed = shape_wait()
if pressed:
red_failure()
return 0
else:
red_success()
return 1
I’ve abbreviated it above, but we’re not changing anything in these functions except at the very bottom, where we’re adding two return lines to each function.
Whenever the player succeeds, we return a score of 1 point, and whenever they fail we return 0 points.
We’re not doing anything with this score yet. We call the green_shape and red_shape functions from inside shape, so first let’s make sure shape passes back the answer to where we need it:
def shape():
GREEN = 0
RED = 1
shape = random.choice( [GREEN, RED] )
if shape == GREEN:
return green_shape()
else:
return red_shape()
shape doesn’t need to do anything special here – just take the answer coming from green_shape or red_shape and use the return statement to pass it back to us.
Now shape is giving us back an answer, we can use it in the main code right at the bottom:
start() correct = 0 for i in range( 10 ): ready_screen() wait() correct += shape() end( correct )
We’ve made a variable called correct that keeps hold of how many correct answers we’ve been given (i.e. the score). It starts off as zero, and every time we call shape we add on the answer that comes back. shape will either return 0 or 1, so correct will increase by either 0 or 1 each time.
The last thing we’ve done here is pass the answer (the player’s final score) into the end function so we can display it. To use this answer, we need to change end a bit:
def end( correct ): print "You got %d correct answers" % correct screen.fill( pygame.Color( "black" ) ) white = pygame.Color( "white" ) write_text( screen, "Thanks for playing!", white, True ) msg = "Score: %d Press a key to exit" % correct write_text( screen, msg, white, False ) pygame.display.flip() pygame.event.clear() timed_wait( 0, press_events )
We changed the def line to allow us to pass in the score, giving it the same name we used below, correct. Then we added a line that prints out the answer into the terminal, just for good measure, and we modified the write_text line, splitting it into 2 parts – creating a variable called msg containing our message, and then using it on the next line.
Twice above we’ve used a nice feature of Python that makes building our own messages quite simple. If you write a string like "Score: %d Press a key to exit" you can substitute a number into it using the % “operator” as we’ve done (an operator is something like + or / that combines 2 things). Where the %d appears in the string, it gets replaced by the number inside the variable you supply (correct in our case). You can also substitute in other strings (using %s) and lots of other things if you want to. This allows us to put the score into a string and then print it on the screen.
If you try your game now you will see it counts how many right answers you got and tells you at the end. Wouldn’t it be better, though, if it told you how you were doing all the way through?
Scroll up to the ready_screen function and modify it to take two arguments and use them to keep us informed:
def ready_screen( go_number, correct ): screen.fill( pygame.Color( "black" ) ) white = pygame.Color( "white" ) write_text( screen, "Ready?", white, True ) go_number_str = "Turn: %d Score: %d" % ( ( go_number + 1 ), correct ) write_text( screen, go_number_str, pygame.Color( "white" ), False ) pygame.display.flip()
The arguments we take are called go_number and correct. correct will be the current score, as we’ve seen before, and go_number is the counter telling us how far we’ve got.
We use a slightly different form of the % operator here to substitute two values into a string instead of one. To do this, we put a list of values on the right instead of just one: ( ( go_number + 1 ), correct ). We need brackets around the outside so that Python knows it is a list and doesn’t just take the first value on its own. When we use a list like this, the values will be substituted in order, one for each %d (or %s or similar) that is in the string. You must always have the same number of %ds in the string as values in the list.
You may be wondering why we have to add one to go_number. We’ll see in a moment.
To be able to provide the two new arguments to ready_screen we need to change the code right at the bottom to look like this:
start()
correct = 0
for i in range( 10 ):
ready_screen( i, correct )
wait()
correct += shape()
end( correct )
Remember when we made the for loop I mentioned that i would be a different number each time we ran the code inside the loop? We pass that number in to ready_screen where it will be used as the go_number. We also pass in the current score, correct.
The reason why we needed to add 1 to go_number inside ready_screen is that when you have a loop like for i in range( 10 ), the variable i actually gets the values 0, 1, 2, … with the last value being 9, instead of ranging from 1 to 10 as you might expect. The reasoning behind this is kind of lost in the mists of time, and kind of makes perfect sense, depending how you look at it. Anyway, believe me when I tell you that once you’ve got used to it you’re going to find it warm and comforting, but for now you may find it a bit weird.
And, on that typically strange note, we have finished! Try out your program, and you should find it tells you what go you’re on, and what your score is all the way through.
Something else you might like to do now is make your game run in full-screen mode (like many games). You can do that by changing the start function like this:
def start():
global screen
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode( screen_size, pygame.FULLSCREEN )
If you have any problems, compare your version with mine here: redgreen.py
I’ve made a slightly extended version of the game that measures your reaction speed and gives you a score based on how quickly you press. In future I may even add more features. If you’d like to follow the project, you can find it here: redgreen on github.
I’ll be doing more series in the future, some for beginners like this one, and some more advanced topics. If you’d like to find out what I’m doing, subscribe to the blog RSS feed, follow me on Twitter or go to my YouTube page and subscribe.
My First Raspberry Pi Game – Part 11 – Being less rudeParts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Writing your first ever computer program on the Raspberry Pi.
We’ve nearly finished our game. Next on our list is to fix that bug where you can’t exit some of the time, and make our code a bit tidier in the process.
The first thing I want to do is make the Esc key quit the game. This is fairly normal behaviour, and will help if we run in full screen mode, where there is no close button to click.
Open up redgreen.py in LeafPad as usual, and find the function shape_wait and the line if evt.type == pygame.QUIT:. Replace the whole line with this:
if is_quit( evt ):
We’ve replaced the code asking whether the event was a quit event (i.e. the user closed the window) with a call to a function. Let’s write that function. Just above shape_wait type in this function:
def is_quit( evt ):
return evt.type == pygame.QUIT
You’ve just done another bit of refactoring. Instead of writing the code directly in the if line, we’ve added a call to the function, and the function does exactly the same thing as we did before: it returns True if the event is a quit event, and False otherwise. If you try the program now (by saving in LeafPad, opening LXTerminal and typing ./redgreen.py) you should see it behaves exactly as it did before.
You may well ask why we did it. The answer is because now we can change the is_quit function to do something extra. Replace it with this:
def is_quit( evt ):
return (
evt.type == pygame.QUIT or
(
evt.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and
evt.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE
)
)
This is a more complicated bit of logic, saying that we will return True if either of two things is true: EITHER the event is a quit event (as before), OR the event is a KEYDOWN, and the specific key that was pressed was the Escape key (“Esc”) on the keyboard. Notice that the brackets around the “and” part help us know which bits go together – we don’t want to quit for any keypress event, only one where the key is Escape.
If you try your program again, you should find you can press Escape to exit when you’re looking at a red or green shape.
The shape_wait function is quite a useful one, and the next thing we want to do is use it in a few more places. Before we can do that, we need to refactor it to make it a bit more flexible.
Make a new function called timed_wait further up, just before start, and cut the entire body of shape_wait and paste it into timed_wait. So it looks like this:
def timed_wait():
event_types_that_cancel = pygame.KEYDOWN, pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN
... all the rest of shape_wait here ...
pygame.time.set_timer( finished_waiting_event_id, 0 )
Now change shape_wait to look like this:
def shape_wait():
"""
Wait while we display a shape. Return True if a key was pressed,
or false otherwise.
"""
return timed_wait()
As usual, we’ve just replaced some code with a call to a function that contains the exact same code, so hopefully our program will work exactly as before.
Now we’re going to make timed_wait a bit more general, while still preserving all the same behaviour. We do this by changing some of the variables we use in timed_wait into arguments we pass in. Change shape_wait to look like this:
def shape_wait():
"""
Wait while we display a shape. Return True if a key was pressed,
or false otherwise.
"""
press_events = pygame.KEYDOWN, pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN
return timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
and modify timed_wait to accept those arguments (notice I also added a description of what it does):
def timed_wait( time_to_wait, event_types_that_cancel ):
"""
Wait for time_to_wait, but cancel if a relevant event happens.
Return True if cancelled, or False if we waited the full time.
"""
finished_waiting_event_id = pygame.USEREVENT + 1
pygame.time.set_timer( finished_waiting_event_id, time_to_wait )
pygame.event.clear()
pressed = False
waiting = True
while waiting:
evt = pygame.event.wait()
if is_quit( evt ):
quit()
elif evt.type in event_types_that_cancel:
waiting = False
pressed = True
elif evt.type == finished_waiting_event_id:
waiting = False
pygame.time.set_timer( finished_waiting_event_id, 0 )
return pressed
Again, after these changes our program should work exactly as before – we’re passing values in as arguments that are exactly what we used to make as variables. But now, timed_wait is a lot more flexible, and we’ll use that flexibility very soon.
But first, we need to make a change to cover the unexpected. Inside timed_wait we’ve made a timer using pygame.time.set_timer and at the end we’ve cancelled it by calling pygame.time.set_timer again. However, if something goes wrong in between where we create the timer, and where we cancel it, it’s possible that something called an “exception” will be “thrown”. When an exception is thrown, the program stops running normally, line by line, and jumps out to somewhere else.
I’m not going to explain any more about exceptions here, but I am going to show you how to make absolutely sure that something will happen, even if an exception is thrown. The way to do that is to use a try ... finally block. We want to make sure our timer is always cancelled, so as soon as we’ve made it, we start a try block, and at the end we say finally. Anything inside that finally block will be run, even if an exception was thrown in the code inside the try block. The changes look like this:
def timed_wait( time_to_wait, event_types_that_cancel ):
"""
Wait for time_to_wait, but cancel if a relevant event happens.
Return True if cancelled, or False if we waited the full time.
"""
finished_waiting_event_id = pygame.USEREVENT + 1
pygame.time.set_timer( finished_waiting_event_id, time_to_wait )
try:
pygame.event.clear()
pressed = False
waiting = True
while waiting:
evt = pygame.event.wait()
if is_quit( evt ):
quit()
elif evt.type in event_types_that_cancel:
waiting = False
pressed = True
elif evt.type == finished_waiting_event_id:
waiting = False
finally:
pygame.time.set_timer( finished_waiting_event_id, 0 )
return pressed
The lines in green are new, and the ones in blue are just indented by four more spaces to make them part of the try and finally blocks. Now, we know that even if something goes wrong while we’re waiting, we will always cancel the timer we set up. Yet more good manners!
Now, after all that work, we finally have a timed_wait function that is flexible enough to be used everywhere we want to wait for something. Let’s start with the wait function. Change it to look like this:
def wait():
time_to_wait = random.randint( 1500, 3000 ) # Between 1.5 and 3 seconds
timed_wait( time_to_wait, () )
By using our clever timed_wait function instead of the built-in pygame.time.wait we gain some extra politeness: we can now quit the program on the “Ready?” screen by closing the window or pressing the Escape key. Try it!
Notice that we passed in () as the second argument to timed_wait. This argument is called event_types_that_cancel and is normally a list of types of event that will stop us waiting. () is Python’s way of saying an empty list, so we’re saying we don’t want to stop for any normal events (such as key presses) – only for quit events, or when the time is up.
Before we change lots more code to use timed_wait, we are going to make a new variable that we can use in lots of places in the code. Quite a few times, we want to wait for either a key press or a mouse click. We want this when we’re showing a red or green square, and when we’re at the end saying goodbye, and ideally we also want it when we’re telling the user how they did, so they can skip it if they’re impatient. So, right near the top, add a new line just below where we create screen_size:
screen_width = 640
screen_height = 480
screen_size = screen_width, screen_height
press_events = pygame.KEYDOWN, pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN
This variable press_events will be our list of normal event types that we consider to be a “press” – essentially, the player doing something. Now that we’ve defined this at the top, we can take out the variable with the same name from shape_wait – it will use the global one instead:
def shape_wait():
"""
Wait while we display a shape. Return True if a key was pressed,
or false otherwise.
"""
return timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
We can also re-use press_events in the end function, and at the same time call our new timed_wait function:
def end():
screen.fill( pygame.Color( "black" ) )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Thanks for playing!", white, True )
write_text( screen, "Press a key to exit", white, False )
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.event.clear()
timed_wait( 0, press_events )
Notice that this time we pass zero as the time to wait – this just means we will never time out on this screen – the zero gets passed in and used in the pygame.time.set_timer call, but passing in zero for the time there means “cancel this event”, and is harmless if the event doesn’t actually exist, so no timer will be set up – we will only stop waiting when the player presses something, which is what we want here.
Now we can make our success and failure functions more polite. Change them all to look like this:
def green_success():
tick()
green = pygame.Color( "green" )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Well done!", green, True )
write_text( screen, "You pressed on green!", white, False )
pygame.display.flip()
timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
def green_failure():
cross()
red = pygame.Color( "red" )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Bad Luck!", red, True )
write_text( screen, "Green means press something!", white, False )
pygame.display.flip()
timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
def red_success():
tick()
green = pygame.Color( "green" )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Well done!", green, True )
write_text( screen, "You didn't press on red!", white, False )
pygame.display.flip()
timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
def red_failure():
cross()
red = pygame.Color( "red" )
white = pygame.Color( "white" )
write_text( screen, "Bad Luck!", red, True )
write_text( screen, "Red means don't press anything!", white, False )
pygame.display.flip()
timed_wait( 2000, press_events ) # 2 seconds
They all call timed_wait saying wait for 2 seconds, but skip if a key is pressed because the player is impatient to get on to the next round. This change means not only can you skip past these success and failure screens, but also you can quit while they are visible, and the last vestige of rudeness has been wiped out from our game.
Well done – just one job left, which is to allow several rounds, and count the player’s score as they play. We’ll do that next time.
In the meantime, you can fix a bug I made – I typed get_width instead of get_height, which made my circles too big. Change the line inside green_shape that looks like radius = screen.get_width() / 3 to look like this:
radius = screen.get_height() / 3
There we are – much better
You can check your verson against mine here: redgreen.py
See you next time, when hopefully we’ll finish the game!