I'm new to python and therefore decided to try to make a simple game in pygame. I want to add a timer/clock that shows how long "you have played/survived", so creating a clock basically.
However, I've searched around and gotten the time.sleep(1) function and it does indeed work as a clock, but it slows down everything else of the game to the point it barely moves.
Is there a simple way to add a clock to the gamescreen?
The number of milliseconds since pygame.init() can be retrieved by pygame.time.get_ticks(). See pygame.time module.
Furthermore in pygame exists a timer event. Use pygame.time.set_timer() to repeatedly create an USEREVENT. e.g.:
time_delay = 500 # 0.5 seconds timer_event = pygame.USEREVENT + 1 pygame.time.set_timer(timer_event , time_delay ) Note, in pygame customer events can be defined. Each event needs a unique id. The ids for the user events have to start at pygame.USEREVENT. In this case pygame.USEREVENT+1 is the event id for the timer event.
Receive the event in the event loop:
running = True while running: for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.QUIT: running = False elif event.type == timer_event: # [...] The timer event can be stopped by passing 0 to the time parameter.
See the example:
import pygame pygame.init() window = pygame.display.set_mode((200, 200)) clock = pygame.time.Clock() font = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 100) counter = 0 text = font.render(str(counter), True, (0, 128, 0)) time_delay = 1000 timer_event = pygame.USEREVENT+1 pygame.time.set_timer(timer_event, time_delay) # main application loop run = True while run: clock.tick(60) # event loop for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.QUIT: run = False elif event.type == timer_event: # recreate text counter += 1 text = font.render(str(counter), True, (0, 128, 0)) # clear the display window.fill((255, 255, 255)) # draw the scene text_rect = text.get_rect(center = window.get_rect().center) window.blit(text, text_rect) # update the display pygame.display.flip() 
