Adding lighting pygame

Question

I have created a day and nigh cycle in a game of mine by drawing a rectangle over the screen and having it's alpha change constantly. However, I obviously want to add some lighting to the game. Is there a way to kind of set the alpha of a particular part of a rectangle to 0 using pygame? Or is there perhaps another way of going about this whole lighting thing?

Answer 1

You can edit the transparency of Surface objects pixel-by-pixel with the surfarray module. The surfarray module is dependent on Numpy.

# SRCALPHA flag means that blit uses source alpha blending.
# It is required for pixels_alpha().
image = pygame.Surface((width, height), pygame.SRCALPHA)

# Create a 2d array that contains per-pixel transparency values of the Surface. (0-255) 
# This is a reference, so it affects original
transparency_array = pygame.surfarray.pixels_alpha(image)  

You can then access the transparency value of each pixel and create light sources.

# single pixel to fully opaque
x, y = 10, 10  # position of the pixel
transparency_array[x, y] = 255

# rectangle 100*100 to fully opaque
width, height = 100, 100  # width and height of the light source
x, y = 200, 200  # x and y position of the center of the light source
transparency_array[x-width/2:x+width/2, y-width/2:y+width/2] = 255

Note that this example is not very efficient, at least not for moving light sources.

If you have a tile-based map you could change your transparencies on a sprite-by-sprite basis. This will be much faster, albeit a little blocky.