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I have a project where i have to create a 4 way split screen using pygame. On this screen i have to draw the same image on each of the screen just have different view of the image. I just can not figure out how to create this 4 way split screen using pygame.

enter image description here

I need my screen to be divided like above so i can draw my points onto each section.

I have been looking around and I can not find anything like this so any help would be great thanks

craft3maker
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    Think you'ld have to manage all that yourself. There most likely won't be any functionality as such. You could try dividing the screen by drawing all the boxes & maintain global screen values necessary to draw to similar position in all screens. – shad0w_wa1k3r Dec 05 '13 at 15:27

3 Answers3

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There is no functions to split screen. But you can draw 4 views directly on screen or you can draw on 4 surfaces (pygame.Surface) and than blit surfaces on screen.

furas
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1

In addition to the surface you have that gets rendered to the display, likely called something like screen, you should create another surface which all of the "action" gets drawn to. You can then use a Rect object for each quadrant of the screen which will represent the "camera" (assuming each quadrant doesn't necessarily need to show exactly the same image). When you draw back to screen, you use each camera Rect object to select a portion of the game space to draw to a specific quadrant.

# canvas will be a surface that captures the entirety of the "action"
canvas = pygame.Surface((800, 600))
# the following are your "camera" objects
# right now they are taking up discrete and even portions of the canvas,
# but the idea is that they can move and possibly cover overlapping sections
# of the canvas
p1_camera = pygame.Rect(0,0,400,300)
p2_camera = pygame.Rect(400,0,400,300)
p3_camera = pygame.Rect(0,300,400,300)
p4_camera = pygame.Rect(400,300,400,300)

On each update, you would then use these "camera" objects to blit various portions of the canvas back to the screen surface.

# draw player 1's view  to the top left corner
screen.blit(canvas, (0,0), p1_camera)
# player 2's view is in the top right corner
screen.blit(canvas, (400, 0), p2_camera)
# player 3's view is in the bottom left corner
screen.blit(canvas, (0, 300), p3_camera)
# player 4's view is in the bottom right corner
screen.blit(canvas, (400, 300), p4_camera)

# then you update the display
# this can be done with either display.flip() or display.update(), the
# uses of each are beyond this question
display.flip()
Haz
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Since you were looking for a way to split the screen in to 4 sections and draw some points on to them I'd suggest creating 4 subsurface surfaces of the original "canvas" image for convenience. These surfaces would act as your player(split screen) canvasses which can easily be modified. This will enable the usage of normalized coordinates for player specific drawing purposes.

Assuming you have a screen surface set up

# Image(Surface) which will be refrenced
canvas = pygame.Surface((800, 600))

# Camera rectangles for sections of  the canvas
p1_camera = pygame.Rect(0,0,400,300)
p2_camera = pygame.Rect(400,0,400,300)
p3_camera = pygame.Rect(0,300,400,300)
p4_camera = pygame.Rect(400,300,400,300)

# subsurfaces of canvas
# Note that subx needs refreshing when px_camera changes.
sub1 = canvas.subsurface(p1_camera)
sub2 = canvas.subsurface(p2_camera)
sub3 = canvas.subsurface(p3_camera)
sub4 = canvas.subsurface(p4_camera)

Now drawing on any of of the subsurfaces with these normalized coordinates

# Drawing a line on each split "screen" 
pygame.draw.line(sub2, (255,255,255), (0,0), (0,300), 10)
pygame.draw.line(sub4, (255,255,255), (0,0), (0,300), 10)
pygame.draw.line(sub3, (255,255,255), (0,0), (400,0), 10)
pygame.draw.line(sub4, (255,255,255), (0,0), (400,0), 10)

# draw player 1's view  to the top left corner
screen.blit(sub1, (0,0))
# player 2's view is in the top right corner
screen.blit(sub2, (400, 0))
# player 3's view is in the bottom left corner
screen.blit(sub3, (0, 300))
# player 4's view is in the bottom right corner
screen.blit(sub4, (400, 300))

# Update the screen
pygame.display.update()

Note that modifications to the subsurface pixels will affect the canvas as well. I'd recommend reading the full documentation on subsurfaces.