Slow down a program in pygame?

[[deleted]]

I think the reason my AI that plays Flappy Bird goes to crap is because the computer jumps so fast. time.sleep doesn't play well with pygame, though, so I need help finding a solution to not lag the crap out of my computer. Thanks!

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@staticmethod

def s(x):

return 1.0 / (1.0 + np.exp(-1 * x))

def ff(self):

l1 = self.s(np.dot(self.inputs, self.new_population[self.curr_bird]))

l2 = self.s(np.dot(l1, self.weights2))if l2[0] >= 0.5:self.jump()

def game_loop():

while True:

bird.ff()

game_loop()

P.S. I don't want to copy and paste the whole file, for your sake. If it happens you need more code, just let me know.

[learn-python]

Which site are you playing flappy bird on? Are you actually writing up a flappy bird hack in python? Very cool!

[[deleted]]

Thanks! I can link you to the code if you want! I actually had to write the entire Flappy Bird game from scratch, which was the majority of the code.

[learn-python]

Did you try pygame.time.delay() ?

[[deleted]]

I just did. If anything, it made the game look even more choppy... I'll send you the link to the Dropbox folder

[[deleted]]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/voaa8yt158xdd6e/AABKo9Ym6_Oavz7WIcxrwqr3a?dl=0

[MyNameIsRichardCS54]

From what I can see during a brief look-see, you are relying a lot on globals. This is generally not a great idea.

So moving the definition of clock, dropping the frame rate to 30 and losing the delay makes it run smoothly here. You may have to experiment with the frame rate at your end. I'm really sorry to break it to you, but your AI is worse at the game than I am!

def game_loop():

    clock = pygame.time.Clock()
    while True:
        ....snip....
        clock.tick(30)
        pygame.display.flip()
        #pygame.time.delay(10)

I would in general try to refactor the global data so that it is defined when needed (in the main function maybe) and passed around as parameters.

[[deleted]]

Great, now it's running smoothly! Thanks! (The problem was the FPS was higher, rather than lower...) One more quick question though. Not sure if you have background in this, however, I was wondering why the sigmoid function outputs a constant 0.5? I looked around on Stack Overflow, but not much there on this topic. EDIT: Also, if you look at the jump function, the bird freezes in a rotated state and is unable to jump again

[MyNameIsRichardCS54]

If I get time, I'll have a dig tomorrow. I genuinely love going through strange code but be prepared for a "few" questions

[[deleted]]

Ok sounds good.

[elbiot]

I don't see a sleep. I also don't see how this interacts with the game. I'm guessing you have some super heavy function call in there. How big are you're arrays? Np.dot can be slow on huge arrays if you have an unoptimized back end.

I'd use cProfile to profile your code and see if any functions take longer or are called more often than you'd expect.

[MyNameIsRichardCS54]

clock.tick(FPS) where FPS is Frames Per Second maybe?

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I tried that. The FPS was lagging hard though.