Questions with creating sprites in pygame

Question

So basically what I know how to do is add a player sprite (make a player class that inherits from pygame.sprite, etc...) this works for me.

What I would like to know how to do is iterate the creation of sprites and add them to the sprite group. This is because I have a 2 dimensional array and I have a function that reads this and places the "tiles" accordingly in the 2d space, this is to create levels easier. So what I want this function to do is create these sprites (I guess with a for loop that reads the array ?) and add them to do the group but this doesn't work so I have some questions first:

1)Can you create sprites outside of the init function in a class?

2)What really are sprites, is it a surface coupled to a rect ?

3)And finally do you have an idea of simply how to get this done: If I give you a 2d array, how would you make the function that reads this array and calculates the position (this is okay, I think I have it figured out) and most importantly, make sprites out of the given positions that can then be added to the sprites group.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Can you create sprites outside of the init function in a class?

Sure.

What really are sprites, is it a surface coupled to a rect ?

If we talk about pygame's Sprite class: yes.

Such a sprite is basically a Surface (the image attribute) and a Rect (the rect attribute). They work best together with pygame's Group classes.

And finally do you have an idea of simply how to get this done ....

Just create a nested loop to iterate over the array.

Here's a simple example:

import pygame
pygame.init()

TILESIZE = 64

class Actor(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self, color, pos):
        super().__init__()
        self.image = pygame.Surface((TILESIZE, TILESIZE))
        self.image.fill(pygame.Color(color))
        self.rect = self.image.get_rect(topleft = pos)

def main():

    data = [
        '     YUB  ',
        '  G       ',
        '        B ',
        '          ',
        '   Y      ',
        '        U ',
    ]

    screen = pygame.display.set_mode((len(data[0]) * TILESIZE, len(data) * TILESIZE))
    sprites = pygame.sprite.Group()

    colors = {
        'G': 'green',
        'B': 'black',
        'Y': 'yellow',
        'U': 'dodgerblue'
    }

    x, y = 0, 0
    for line in data:
        for char in line:
            if char in colors:
                sprites.add(Actor(colors[char], (x * TILESIZE, y * TILESIZE)))
            x += 1
        x = 0
        y += 1

    while True:
        events = pygame.event.get()
        for event in events:
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                pygame.quit()
                return

        sprites.update()

        screen.fill((100, 100, 100))
        sprites.draw(screen)

        pygame.display.flip()

main()

You can find another example here.