Hi all, I have been playing with my development system recently, and despite the stupidly bad integrated graphics chip (Thanks Intel!) I thought I'd checkout XGL and AIGLX with Compiz. For those who dont know, it's the OpenGL enhanced X Server, implemented alternatively by Novel and Redhat, and with the Compiz window manager, allows for all sorts of funky effects on your desktop. Anyway, getting to the point. One of the main reasons for people wanting to use it on Linux is that it gives real transparency at the Window Manager level.
This appears to have shown up what I think is a pygame bug where the whole pygame screen is translucent. I have to open a black console and move the window over it to see everything properly. I've put up some example screenshots on my webserver at http://www.mibgames.co.uk/trans.html This seems to cover a wide variety of other applications too, include Phils Game Utilities, Shadows.py and pygame-console (as a randomly selected selection from the pygame.org sidebar) Interestingly, Nelly's Rooftop Garden doesn't have this problem, but does now exhibit a serious flicker when playing which it didn't before. I'm totally lost as to what might be causing it and why some things dont seem to have the translucency. For exmaple the pygame-console application is not translucent where the actual console is, only where the drawing area is. In my application, the start intro doesn't have that problem, but I'm manually blitting full screen images and calling flip() which I don't in my actual game. I hope that helps someone have a look, as I said I don't really know where to start looking, so I hope that some of this information is able to help someone else to spot it, or to see if I'm doing something wrong.
