Countdown timer in Pygame

Question

I started using pygame and I want to do simple game. One of the elements which I need is countdown timer. How can I do the countdown time (eg 10 seconds) in PyGame?

Answer 1

In pygame exists a timer event. Use pygame.time.set_timer() to repeatedly create an USEREVENT. e.g.:

timer_interval = 500 # 0.5 seconds
timer_event = pygame.USEREVENT + 1
pygame.time.set_timer(timer_event , timer_interval)

Note, in pygame customer events can be defined. Each event needs a unique id. The ids for the user events have to be between pygame.USEREVENT (24) and pygame.NUMEVENTS (32). In this case pygame.USEREVENT+1 is the event id for the timer event.
To disable the timer for an event, set the milliseconds argument to 0.

Receive the event in the event loop:

running = True
while running:

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

         elif event.type == timer_event:
             # [...]

The timer event can be stopped by passing 0 to the time parameter.

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See the example:

import pygame

pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((200, 200))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
font = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 100)
counter = 10
text = font.render(str(counter), True, (0, 128, 0))

timer_event = pygame.USEREVENT+1
pygame.time.set_timer(timer_event, 1000)

run = True
while run:
    clock.tick(60)
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False
        elif event.type == timer_event:
            counter -= 1
            text = font.render(str(counter), True, (0, 128, 0))
            if counter == 0:
                pygame.time.set_timer(timer_event, 0)                

    window.fill((255, 255, 255))
    text_rect = text.get_rect(center = window.get_rect().center)
    window.blit(text, text_rect)
    pygame.display.flip()