Pygame Draw Circle Causing Lag

Question

I am creating a infinity scrolling 2d space battle game in pygame. I have just implemented a parallax star background, but my framerate is now 30fps. Do you how to get more performance, i've tried creating blitting instead of draw.circle, and hwsurface, but cant increase fps. Download zip

Answer 1

I would suggest that you do not create the star background on the fly the way it sounds like you are doing. Instead create a surface that contains it at the start and then scroll through that. Wrap it around on itself so that as you go past the edge it continues from the beginning. You will want to make sure that the two edges blend and appear seamless.

Then you can just blit the part of the background onto the screen and you will not find it has much impact on your performance vs generating it on the fly all the time.

In fact if you are doing it ahead of time you can do something fancier than just circles. You can do stars with different sizes and brightness (color). Maybe even a glare effect.

Edited after comment from OP:

I thought from what you described you were scrolling it not rotating. If you are doing rotations, I assume that you are using pygame.transform.rotate() for the rotations. One thing I have done in the past if I need rotated images is again to rotate them before hand and save them. That can work well if you are just rotating (even saving 360 rotated images is not that bad memory wise), but if you are scrolling and rotating then that would not work