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pygame - constant frame rate

I would like to achieve a frame rate as constant as possible in my Pygame game.

This answer (Setting a fixed FPS in Pygame, Python 3) explains how to give a fluent and frame-rate-independant result, but this is not the same as a constant frame rate.

What I expect is (for 30 FPS objective):

  • if processing time is less than 1/30 s, sleep the amount a time left to avoid using all CPU ressource.
  • if more, don't sleep.

One solution (but doesn't seem optimal, not sure why):

... setup pygame...
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

# Main loop
while True:
    ...do some processing...
    ...possibly not same computation time every frame...
    dt = clock.tick(0)
    if dt < 1/FPS:
        clock.tick(1/ (1/FPS - dt))

Edited clock.tick after @Rabbid76's answer.

Solution

  • I believe that you can call clock.tick() with your desired frame rate, and it will do the right thing. That is, you can replace the last three lines of your code with just clock.tick(FPS).