So far in this course and its predecessor CPSC 128 we have been confined to producing text output to a terminal. That would have been fine in the days when all we had were text terminals, but in the age of windowing operating systems using bitmapped graphics it has looked a little primitive and unpolished.
The reason we haven't dealt with bit-mapped graphics until now is that it involves details and busywork which would have detracted from the main thrust of algorithmic development, and that all the bitmapped graphics libraries are object oriented so we needed to get some experience with OOP first.
I'm hoping that we've done enough programming now that the details won't confuse you, and that we've seen enough OOP to be able to read and use an OO library. At any rate we are about to find out!
The following pages should lead you through the installation of PyGame and up to drawing simple diagrams with it. In later weeks we will look at using PyGame to make things move on-screen (or at least seem to move, animation is all a con). We will continue to use the pygame library both to produce static graphical output, and to produce dynamic or animated output as the course proceeds.
You should enter and run each program!
The code is all in the form of images, so I'm afraid you can't cut and paste it, but there is very little new code from one sample to the next, so if you just edit each file to create the next one in the sequence you won't have to do much typing, and doing so should be instructive.
As you work your way through the examples look for the bright red comments each time you get to a new program . I have tried to make the code self-explanatory, and have commented each significant addition. Comments are not repeated to keep the code spare, so a feature is only described the first time it is added to the code. You will have to pay a bit more attention to notice what has been removed from one version to the next, but the comments often refer to the deletions.