Pygame error: display surface quit: Why?-Collection of common programming errors
I had a similar problem in a very simple piece of code:
import sys, pygame
pygame.init()
size = width, height = 640, 480
speed = [2, 2]
black = 0, 0, 0
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)
ball = pygame.image.load("Golfball.png")
ballrect = ball.get_rect()
while 1:
event = pygame.event.poll()
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
pygame.quit()
ballrect = ballrect.move(speed)
if ballrect.left < 0 or ballrect.right > width:
speed[0] = -speed[0]
if ballrect.top < 0 or ballrect.bottom > height:
speed[1] = -speed[1]
screen.fill(black)
screen.blit(ball, ballrect)
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.time.delay(5)
Error message was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "bounce.py", line 22, in
screen.fill(black)
pygame.error: display Surface quit
So I put
import pdb
at the top after
pygame.init()
and used
pdb.set_trace()
after the line with
pygame.quit()
Now I ran the program, clicked to close the window and was actually a bit surprised to see that I fell into the debugger (after all, I expected the quit to completely take me out immediately). So I concluded that the quit doesn’t actually stop everything at that point. Looked like the program was continuing beyond the quit, was reaching
screen.fill(black)
and this was causing the problem. So I added
break
after the
pygame.quit()
and all works happily now.
[ Added later: It occurs to me now that
pygame.quit()
is quitting the module, and not the program that is running, so you need the break to get out of this simple program. ]
Just for the record, this means the good version is
import sys, pygame
pygame.init()
size = width, height = 640, 480
speed = [2, 2]
black = 0, 0, 0
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)
ball = pygame.image.load("Golfball.png")
ballrect = ball.get_rect()
while 1:
event = pygame.event.poll()
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
pygame.quit()
break
ballrect = ballrect.move(speed)
if ballrect.left < 0 or ballrect.right > width:
speed[0] = -speed[0]
if ballrect.top < 0 or ballrect.bottom > height:
speed[1] = -speed[1]
screen.fill(black)
screen.blit(ball, ballrect)
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.time.delay(5)