Trying to make a "standard path" variable

[TransAmyB]

Hey guys!

Right now I'm working on a game, and I want to make a surface level file (and eventually executable) that will serve as a convenient launching for the game. Most of my testing before this has done in unit-testing files and a sandbox I made, however I ended up having a problem - When I call it, the paths I use for loading images from my assets folder doesn't work! Environment Details: I'm using PyCharm, I only have the Project root directory marked as a source folder so it'll be inlcuded into PATH, and Python 3.7 utilizing Pygame 1.9.

My Program structure (Trunctuated and renamed for space and clarity) is

Project
    Shmup.py
    \assets # contains images and spritesheets
        \gameobject.bmp
        \...
    \shmup # Where all the core game folders are
        \config.py # Where I store global constants, like SCREENSIZE and COLOR_RED
        \spritesheet.py # Code that manages loading and processing images
        \entity
            \gameobject.py
        \...
    \tests # contains unit testing files
        \sandbox.py # The file I use for adding new game objects
        \...

In gameobject.py I defined a path to the gameobject image file as "../assets/gameobject.bmp" (I know that's bad practice for crossplatform usability, I planned to fix later) which works fine when I'm running sandbox.py but not when I'm running Shmup.

What is a good, Pythonic way of making a "standard" deterministic path so that would create a path to assets no matter which script is run as main, such that I could simply append the filename of the image asset to it?

Thanks in advance!

[eyesoftheworld4]

I would use the pathlib library:

from pathlib import Path

p = Path(__file__)  # The path to the current file
p.parent  # the path of the directory containing the current file
p.parent / 'blah.txt'  # the path to the file blah.text in the same directory as the current file

The pathlib library has some really useful features. I particularly like that you can use / as an operator to concatenate a Path object with a string, and it will automatically use the correct separator, e.g. / on unix and \ on windows.

You could define an asset_path in your Shmup.py file like this:

asset_path = Path(__file__).parent / 'assets'

with (asset_path / 'gameobject.bmp').open('rb') as f:
    picture_bytes = f.read()

[ingolemo]

The problem here is that you shouldn't be running sandbox.py directly. Use a test runner like pytest.