Hello again Python Programmers! To reply to my own question:
-----Original Message----- I'm importing a graphic named Counter_1.png for the counter. I'd like its background to be transparent, using the PNG's built-in alpha channel. -------------------------- I've modified the code at... <http://rene.f0o.com/mywiki/LectureFour#head-52d34285fd010fdc1164ea8ccbe 77980cac42b61> ... so that it uses pygame's image.convert_alpha() if the loaded image appears to have an alpha channel (see below). My code does this by checking if image.get_masks()[3] is non-zero. However, the pygame documentation at... <http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/surface.html#Surface.get_masks> ... states that .get_masks() is "not needed for normal Pygame usage". This suggests to me that I am missing a more standard way of detecting if an pygame.image has an alpha channel. Is my technique likely to fail? Is there a better way of doing this? Thanks in advance for your insights, James def load_image(filename, colorkey=None): # INPUT: <filename> should be an absolute or relative path to an # image file # <colorkey> should be None, an rgb tuple, or -1, in which # case the color of the top left pixel will be used. # ACTION: Attempts to read in an image from filename, and (if # required) applies a transparency mask to it. # OUTPUT: Returns a pygame Surface try: image = pygame.image.load(filename) except pygame.error, message: print "Cannot load image:", filename raise SystemExit, message # Make a new copy of a Surface and convert it to screen depth vAlpha = image.get_masks()[3] # (255, 65280, 16711680, -16777216) for an RGBA image # (31744, 992, 31, 0) for a 2-bit/pixel rrrrrgggggbbbbbx BMP image if vAlpha != 0: # The image has an alpha channel image = image.convert_alpha() else: # The image has no alpha channel, but we may have a colorkey image = image.convert() if colorkey is not None: if colorkey is -1: colorkey = image.get_at((0, 0)) image.set_colorkey(colorkey, RLEACCEL) return image _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
