Place It with a Rect

Part of the Sprites and Images section of Coddy's Pygame journey. Lesson 2 of 36.

Working out a top left corner by hand means sums for every image you place. Every Surface can give you a Rect of its own size:

ship_rect = ship.get_rect(center=(320, 400))

get_rect() alone is Rect(0, 0, 64, 64). A keyword places it: center, midbottom, topleft, or any other point a Rect has. Here the ship's middle goes at (320, 400) and pygame works out the corner, (288, 368).

Blit the image at the Rect and it lands on the Rect's top left corner:

screen.blit(ship, ship_rect)

Now the Rect is the ship's position. Change ship_rect.x or ship_rect.centery and the next frame draws the ship there. This is how every image in a game moves: keep a Rect, change the Rect, blit at the Rect. It is also the Rect you test collisions with, as in section 2.

Challenge

Easy

After loading ship, make ship_rect = ship.get_rect(center=(320, 400)).
Blit ship at ship_rect instead of a fixed point.

Try it yourself

import pygame

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((640, 480))
pygame.display.set_caption("Space Images")
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

ship = pygame.image.load("assets/images/ship.png").convert_alpha()

running = True
while running:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            running = False

    screen.fill((20, 22, 40))
    screen.blit(ship, (288, 208))
    pygame.display.flip()
    clock.tick(60)

pygame.quit()