Feature proposal: world built-in

[Mambouna]

pgzero is currently very suited to making games that take up only a single screen.

I propose the addition of a world built-in to allow easy management and realization of games with content outside of a single screens space.

As a first idea, I think world could be an object of a class World which has two main features. A set of position offsets for X and Y and a list of Actors. The X and Y offsets would allow the "camera position" to move by changing the absolute X and Y positions of everything in the world. The X and Y positions of each individual actor in the world would instead refer to their position in the world. This is realized by having the world be drawn with world.draw(). This function would go through each actors, change their position by the world offset, call .draw() on them and then change their position back.

This would obviously be quite unperformant so a change to the .draw() function with an optional parameter or a modified new function to draw at a specific position could allow more optimized drawing for lots of actors in the world.

I'm happy to get any feedback or ideas on this. I think something along these lines could really expand what's easily possible with pgzero. A natural expansion might see the world being rotatable.

[ullmer]

@Mambouna -- I find your idea very interesting and resonant. A few elements of possible relevance are in https://github.com/ullmer/plasma/tree/iz/apps/demo/a.square.01 and https://github.com/ullmer/plasma/tree/iz/libPlasma/pythonc , among many other swiftly evolving locations. These include a ~multiscale image manager for handling zooming and translating of very large images (e.g., 30kx30k pixel scans of old maps); some network transport mechanisms based on the Animist OS & plasma; and my multitouch and embedded electronic pygame zero bindings. I've also made some interoperable 3D graphics bindings to the pivy/coin3d/OpenInventor binding within FreeCAD, but these are not visible here. Current targets include many-screened versions (e.g., via Ubuntu on Surface Pro4 & Book1/2/3), Raspberry Pi with various small screens, etc. Still a bit off, but happy to elaborate here, in Discord (e.g., the pgzero-dev channel on the wasabi2d server, or on the animist-os.org server), etc. if you or others are interested.

[Mambouna]

@ullmer I must admit I couldn't quite follow your message. I can kind of see the connection to a lib for large-scale image handling, but that's probably not a common enough usecase in a beginner friendly package like PGZero to justify adding a whole complex library.

The last word on that would of course be @lordmauve but I don't see what you mean here right now.