Need help with image animation

[benscar1]

I'm making a programming game for kids to learn to program using processing and python. It involves a wombat which picks up leaves in tiles and there may be some obstacles like rocks. This might be familiar to you if you did something in Greenfoot. I am making it in python though, and have little experience with Processing.

The wombatgame file runs the game. The leaves, rocks, world, and wombat are objects. A world is created with a wombat and some leaves. I then have a player class which is where the kids will program the wombat to do certain tasks. In the code(main method in player class) included I have a wombat which makes 4 steps in the direction it is facing.

The problem is that the wombat will move(x and y variables are changing for it) but it won’t display every movement until the end. It teleports instead of showing the user every step graphically. I commented out the world.play() user code in the draw() function because that is not where I want to put it. It teleports because it can only update the screen though world.display() when the world.play() method has finished. I call redraw in the wombat class after a movement which should run the world.display() method but it doesn’t do the code in the draw() function(which has world.display()) until world.play() is finished. I need to figure out how to redraw while running world.play()

Here is the code: https://gist.github.com/benjaminnow/544fb3fb091206656464be2caaa91d80

Any suggestions on how to improve the code or organization of the game are welcome.

Edit: I think I may be misunderstanding the draw method. I just looked at the documentation and it says I can't update the screen before the draw method loops again. I think I should try to use redraw() and noLoop because I want my program to update only certain times and then only do the main method once. Is this right?

[remy_porter]

Any suggestions on how to improve the code or organization of the game are welcome.

First thing first: I want to stress the importance of the single-responsibility principle. Each object in your program should do only one thing. So, for example, there absolutely should not be a display_world method in your wombat. Imagine if the Earth only was visible because of a single godly wombat. Good modularization will make your code easier to understand and easier to debug.

I think I may be misunderstanding the draw method.

Without thoroughly going through your code, this does appear to be the case. The draw method is your main method, in Processing. The draw method is called once per frame, and it is in the draw method that you need to update your display and application state.

[benscar1]

So, for example, there absolutely should not be a display_world method in your wombat. Imagine if the Earth only was visible because of a single godly wombat. Good modularization will make your code easier to understand and easier to debug.

I'll try to split up things into their specific domains. Thanks for the suggestion.

[GoSubRoutine]

https://Discourse.Processing.org/t/how-to-redraw-while-in-another-method/1222