Multiple Displays in Pygame

Question

I'm making a little game and I want to make another window separately from my main one.

I have the the main game in a main window, and I want to open a new window and do a little animation when the user does something.

In my example code below, when the user presses "a" I want it to open a new window and blit to there.

Here I set up the two windows: (I know this doesnt work, its what I'm asking how to do)

SCREEN_X = 400
SCREEN_Y = 400
BSCREEN_X = 240
BSCREEN_Y = 160

BATTLE_SCENE = pygame.display.set_mode((BSCREEN_X, BSCREEN_Y))
SCREEN = pygame.display.set_mode((SCREEN_X, SCREEN_Y))

and then the program:

def run_ani ():
    #Do animation, blitting to BATTLE_SCENE
    return

def main_game():
    ending=False
    while ending==False:
        clock.tick(30)
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT: ending=True
            if event.type == KEYDOWN: # key down or up?
                if event.key == K_ESCAPE:
                    ending=True # Time to leave
                    print("Stopped Early by user")
                elif event.key == K_a:
                    run_ani()
        #Normal screen motion, blitting to SCREEN
        if ending: pygame.quit()
    return

So far what this does is draws the main screen, then when A is pressed, it stops drawing the main screen animations, but still draws the other animations on the main screen and draws in the top left corner.

I'm pretty sure it does this because I am setting BATTLE_SCENE to be smaller than the main screen, thus when blitting to BATTLE_SCENE it blits to the area I created (240x160) in the top corner of the main screen.

However I want BATTLE_SCENE to be a seperate window, so that when I press 'a' it will pop up, do its thing, then close or at least go behind the main screen.

How to do this? Is it even possible?

Answer 1

Yes, that is possible. SDL2 is able to open multiple windows. In the example folder you can take a look at "video.py".

https://github.com/pygame/pygame/blob/main/examples/video.py

"This example requires pygame 2 and SDL2. _sdl2 is experimental and will change."