Transparent Window in Pygame or Python

Question

Im trying to make a transparent window for a splash screen for my game. The image has transparency but I cant make the window transparent(like see screen, desktop, etc.. behind it) All I've found is a no-go with pygame. Is there any external libraries that I could pull from to make this possible? BTW. This is entirely a Linux project. So os specific are ok too.

#Splash Screen
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((680,300), NOFRAME)
splashbg = pygame.image.load("Images/SplashBG.png")
font = pygame.font.Font(None, 36)

pygame.mixer.music.load("OriginalEnd.mp3")
pygame.mixer.music.play(-1)

screen.blit(splashbg,(0,0))
loadingtext = font.render("Loading...", 1, (255,255,255))
screen.blit(loadingtext, (200,250))
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.time.delay(4000)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/550001/fully-transparent-windows-in-pygame -- according to that it's not possible... it may be possible with a beta version of SDL, but I don't know if it's possible to make pygame work with a different version of SDL — 0eggxactly, Apr 29 '12 at 16:28
Thanks for that link, it said something about wxpython, i'll delve into that. Like I said it doesnt specifically have to be a pygame function — Amnite, Apr 29 '12 at 18:00
Wxpython does work, I have done this with wxpython, however it is not at all an elegant fix. It just copies the pixels behind it, so if anything around it moves you can tell it isn't really transparent. Also wxpython has some irritating design flaws. For something simple like a splash screen I might still recommend it, but know what you are getting into. — trevorKirkby, Dec 05 '14 at 23:58
Related: [Transparent Window in Pygame or Python](https://stackoverflow.com/q/550001/3357935) — Stevoisiak, Aug 14 '18 at 15:59

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '12 at 15:18

You could always ghetto version it with pretend transparency. It's not an ideal solution by any means, but it may work..

Before you launch your screen, use PIL to take a snapshot of the desktop, blit that first, and then draw your transparent image over it. That way it'll at least give the illusion of transparency.

Something kind of like:

import ImageGrab, Image 

im = Imagegrab.grab()
im.save('faux_trans.png','png')

for_trans = pygame.image.load('faux_trans.png').convert()

splash = pygame.image.load.... 

screen.blit(for_trans, (0,0))

# and so on.

Like I said, not the greatest solution, but if you launch your game NOFRAME, or FULLSCREEN, you may be able to get away with it! :)

Its a temporary solution. I couldnt find anything to make it work. Thanks Ill prob just use this... — Amnite, May 02 '12 at 03:56

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 02 '19 at 15:14

For a cross-platform solution, you can use the Raylib-Python-CFFI library.

Raylib features 2D, 3D, font-drawing, and much more than can be drawn on a transparent window:

Cross platform transparent window

Source code from above example:

from raylib.dynamic import raylib as rl, ffi

rl.SetConfigFlags(rl.FLAG_WINDOW_TRANSPARENT | rl.FLAG_WINDOW_RESIZABLE)
rl.InitWindow(800, 600, b'Transparency Test')


CLEAR = [0] * 4
GREEN = [140, 189, 72, 255]

font_size = 60
camera = ffi.new("struct Camera3D *", [[18.0, 16.0, 18.0], [0.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 1.0, 0.0], 45.0, 0])

rl.SetCameraMode(camera[0], rl.CAMERA_ORBITAL)

while not rl.WindowShouldClose():
    rl.UpdateCamera(camera)
    rl.BeginDrawing()
    rl.ClearBackground(CLEAR)
    rl.BeginMode3D(camera[0])
    rl.DrawGrid(20, 1)
    rl.DrawCube([0, 0, 0], 2, 2, 2, GREEN)
    rl.EndMode3D()
    rl.DrawText(b'Hello World', 64, 64, font_size, GREEN)
    rl.EndDrawing()

Transparent Window in Pygame or Python

2 Answers2

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