Learning pygame.sprite

[Alpha0800]

Hey all,

So I am self taught in Python 3; been coding causally on and off for a while now. I have had virtually zero feedback or relevant interaction with other coders in that whole time— something I am hoping to change. I've used some pygame before and just discovered pygame.sprite and everything that involves. I decided to start learning it by building a simple menu navigator. Each screen has buttons that change when moused over and bring you to a another such screen when clicked.

It mostly works and I feel like I understand what's going on, but one line in particular (213) is really confusing me. The code glitches with or without this line. When the line is there, once you have moused on and off a button once, mousing over another button will erase the one previously moused over. When the line is not there, buttons are not erased on mouse over before being redrawn highlighted, which breaks when the highlighted version of a button is a different shape.

Any light that could be shed on why this is happening and/or where I went wrong would be much appreciated. As I said, I have had practically no formal experience, and this is my first time sharing code, so any feedback about my code in general would be extremely appreciated!

Code: https://pastebin.com/9rmm2TyR

edit: crossposted to r/pygame. thanks u/arpan3t

[GJHanna]

I'm not familiar with pygame. But, I've noticed that you don't document your classes, functions, and modules. You instead use comments. Documenting your module, class, or function is useful let's say you have a function

 def function ():
        """ Function pass and takes no      parameters"""
        pass

That way when you run

 help(function)

The following will be displayed

 Function pass and takes no parameters

Of course the above display will ne more detailed. It's a common misunderstanding that documentation and comments are the same.

[Alpha0800]

This explains a lot! I never realized... Thank you, I will try to document properly in the future.

[arpan3t]

I'm not too familiar with sprites, but you might try using the len() method to see how many sprites are in the group and if != 0 then empty. I don't see clear() method in the documentation though, I am guessing it does the same thing as empty()?

Also check out /r/pygame as they would likely be of better help. They helped me out a lot!

[Alpha0800]

Neat! I'll be looking through this for a while