How to make copies of a rectangle stay drawn on the screen and impermeable in pygame

Question

I am making a game that is a tetris-like puzzle game, and it involves placing square blocks down. I have it set up to where when the program is run, a block is spawned above a fenced in area, and that block moves down every 1000ms. It can be moved in different directions using left, right, or down, and when it hits the bottom boundary, the y position resets back to default and a "copy" of the block is placed at it's previous position. I am trying to figure out how to make the copy stay drawn, and also how to make the copy block impermeable, as the main block can actually occupy the same position as the copy after it is placed down.

I am very new to python and pygame, so all I have thought to do is possibly make a variable called copyCount, and whenever a copy is drawn, add a number to that count, and for every number in range(copyCount), draw a rectangle. Otherwise though, I am blanking. No idea also on how to make said copy block impermeable (check both the Y positions of the copy and main block?)

I expected for the blocks to stay drawn on the screen but they do not.

Rabbid76 Rabbid76 · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-06T18:39:24

You can create a copy of a pygame.Rect by .copy.

Create a list for finally placed rectangles. When the player reaches the ground, then pit a .copy() of player to the list. Draw the list of copies (copylist).

copylist = []
while run:

    # [...]

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False
        elif event.type == moveDownEvent:
            if player.y < 390:
                player.y += vel
            elif player.y >= 390:
                copylist.append(player.copy()) # <--- copy rectangle
                player.y = 50  

    # [...]

    # draw copies
    for c in copylist:    
        pygame.draw.rect(win,(40,100,0),c)

    pygame.draw.rect(win, (100,40,0), player)
    pygame.display.update()

Note, copylist can be used to check for a collision with the player. To place the new blocks on top of the blocks on the ground. Collisions of rectangles can be checked by .colliderect() or collidelist():

e.g.

while run:
    pygame.time.delay(100)

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False
        elif event.type == moveDownEvent:
            if player.y >= 390 or player.move(0, vel).collidelist(copylist) >= 0:
                copylist.append(player.copy())
                player.y = 50 
            else:
                player.y += vel

    keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
    if keys[pygame.K_LEFT] and player.x > 168 and player.move(-vel, 0).collidelist(copylist) < 0:
        player.x -= vel
    if keys[pygame.K_RIGHT] and player.x < 330 and player.move(vel, 0).collidelist(copylist) < 0:
        player.x += vel
    if keys[pygame.K_DOWN] and player.y < 390:
        if player.move(0, vel).collidelist(copylist) >= 0:
            copylist.append(player.copy())
            player.y = 50 
        else:
            player.y += vel

    # [...]

How to make copies of a rectangle stay drawn on the screen and impermeable in pygame

1 Answers