Hello all pygame people, I am using pygame about a year now, and was thinking about, what useful core features would be nice to have or improve. So for now I have pair of thoughts, just looking forward for informal discussion about your ideas too. To mention: I am not the pygame library developer, so don't actually know how the things work behind the lib.
So at the moment there are two things which I experience and think about. 1. It turns out that 32 bit surfaces is an overkill in most cases. Good that there is 8 bit mode. But I ask myself: - how does the indexed image is generally rendered? Is it like: it sends index array to video card and the card makes substitution? if yes this could be a great simplification for my program logic and minimize redundant conversion on cpu. I could make all the calculation in integer arrays and just pass the array to render in my palette. Or am I only dreaming? But sure enough modern cards can do the substituton effectively. - how is about supporting 16 bit indexed rendering? 8 bit is good but 16 bit would be also not bad. Numpy also supports int16 type. - when something is not possible due to SDL possibilities, could the latter be changed somehow? 2. Using bitmasks for rendering. This was discussed and asked several times on stackoverflow, how to blit in a mask. Fast option is colorkey. But AFAIK it is still not possible to blit inside custom defined bit mask (simple boolean array), so would be a nice feature too. Colorkey is simple but not so flexible and you must always check if colorkey value does not occur in the image. Cheers Mikhail
