Embedding a Pygame window into a Tkinter or WxPython frame

Question

A friend and I are making a game in pygame. We would like to have a pygame window embedded into a tkinter or WxPython frame, so that we can include text input, buttons, and dropdown menus that are supported by WX or Tkinter. I have scoured the internet for an answer, but all I have found are people asking the same question, none of these have been well answered.

What would be the best way implement a pygame display embedded into a tkinter or WX frame? (TKinter is preferable)

Any other way in which these features can be included alongside a pygame display would also work.

Answer 1

(Note this solution does not work on Windows systems with Pygame 2. See Using 'SDL_WINDOWID' does not embed pygame display correctly into another application #1574. You can currently download older versions of Pygame here.)

According to this SO question and the accepted answer, the simplest way to do this would be to use an SDL drawing frame.

This code is the work of SO user Alex Sallons.

import os import pygame import Tkinter as tk from Tkinter import *  root = tk.Tk() embed = tk.Frame(root, width = 500, height = 500) #creates embed frame for pygame window embed.grid(columnspan = (600), rowspan = 500) # Adds grid embed.pack(side = LEFT) #packs window to the left buttonwin = tk.Frame(root, width = 75, height = 500) buttonwin.pack(side = LEFT) os.environ['SDL_WINDOWID'] = str(embed.winfo_id()) os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'windib' screen = pygame.display.set_mode((500,500)) screen.fill(pygame.Color(255,255,255)) pygame.display.init() pygame.display.update()  def draw():     pygame.draw.circle(screen, (0,0,0), (250,250), 125)     pygame.display.update()  button1 = Button(buttonwin,text = 'Draw',  command=draw) button1.pack(side=LEFT) root.update()  while True:     pygame.display.update()     root.update() 

This code is cross-platform, as long as the windib SDL_VIDEODRIVER line is omitted on non Windows systems. I would suggest

# [...] import platform if platform.system == "Windows":     os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'windib' # [...]