Release News

This describes the latest changes between the PySDL2 releases.

0.9.10

Released on 2022-01-11.

New Features:

  • Updated the sdlttf, sdlimage, sdlmixer, and sdlgfx modules to use a new method of ctypes wrapping that allows functions to support kwargs (i.e. using function arguments by name), inline documentation, and more flexible handling of argument types and SDL errors (PR #199)
  • Updated to wrap new functions and constants in in SDL2 2.0.18 (PR #197)
  • Added full inline documentation for the sdlttf, sdlimage, and sdlgfx modules, as well as partial inline documentation for the sdlmixer modlue. In addition to Python-specific argument and return types, the new docstrings also include including code examples and documentation of Python-specific quirks (PR #200)
  • Update bindings to allow for experimental SDL 2.0.3 support. Versions of SDL2 this old are not officially supported, but this should allow for basic PySDL2 support on old PowerPC macs (PR #202)
  • Added new isiterable() and utf8() Python 2/3 compatibility functions to the compat module for checking if an object is a non-string iterable and for converting input to a UTF-8 unicode string, respectively (PR #204)
  • The sdl2.ext.subsurface() function has been re-documented and rewritten to have improved input handling and type checking (PR #204)
  • Improved inference of compression format for .tar archives in the sdl2.ext.resources submodule (PR #204)
  • Added a new function sdl2.ext.surface_to_ndarray() that returns a non-transposed copy of a given SDL surface as a 2D or 3D Numpy array (PR #204)
  • Added new functions sdl2.ext.load_bmp() and sdl2.ext.load_img() for importing image files using SDL2 and SDL_image, respectively. Both new functions automatically convert the obtained surfaces to the ARGB8888 pixel format by default (PR #205)
  • Added a new function sdl2.ext.save_bmp() for saving SDL surfaces to BMP files (PR #205)
  • Added a new function sdl2.ext.pillow_to_surface() for converting PIL.Image.Image objects from the Pillow library to SDL surfaces (PR #205)
  • Added a new class sdl2.ext.Texture for creating renderer textures from SDL surfaces, as a basic wrapper for the sdl2.SDL_Texture structure (PR #207)
  • Added a new function sdl2.ext.set_texture_scale_quality() that globally sets the scaling method (nearest-neighbour, linear filtering, or anisotropic filtering) to use for new SDL textures (PR #207)
  • Added a new method sdl2.ext.Renderer.reset_logical_size() to reset a Renderer’s logical size to its original value (PR #207)
  • Added a new method sdl2.ext.Renderer.destroy() to safely destroy and free memory associated with a Renderer after it is no longer needed (PR #207)
  • Added support for subpixel precision (i.e. using float coordinates) with the drawing and copying methods of the Renderer class when using SDL2 2.0.10 or newer (PR #207)
  • Added sdl2.ext.Renderer.blit() as an alias for the sdl2.ext.Renderer.copy() method (PR #207)
  • Added a new method remap() to the BitmapFont class to allow specifying custom character widths and heights for each mapped character in a bitmap font (PR #208)
  • Added a new argument line_h to sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.render_on() to allow specifying custom line heights (PR #208)
  • Added the FontTTF class, providing a new and flexible Pythonic wrapper around the sdlttf module for opening and rendering text with TrueType and OpenType fonts. New features include custom line heights for multi-line text, left/right/center justification operations for multiline text, and specifying font sizes in units of pixels in addition to pt (PR #210)
  • Updated PySDL2 to automatically find and use Homebrew SDL2 binaries on Apple Silicon macs if no other usable binaries can be found.

Fixed Bugs:

  • Fixed a typo in the sdlttf bindings where an alias for the TTF_RenderUTF8_Shaded() function was incorrectly bound to TTF_RenderUTF instead of TTF_RenderUTF8.
  • Fixed a bug introduced in 0.9.9 where the SDL_WINDOW_INPUT_GRABBED constant was no longer exported.
  • MemoryView and ``arr[-1][-1]` for accessing the last element in a 2D array). In previous versions, negative indices would retrieve values from undefined sections of memory outside the surface (PR #204)
  • Changed the functions in the sdl2.ext.pixelaccess module to no longer try to unlock RLE surfaces once their corresponding view objects are deleted. This prevents a segmentation fault when a view is garbage-collected but the surface has already been freed (PR #204)
  • Fixed a bug where the rectangle returned by sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.render_on() would overestimate the size of the rendered text by one character in both width and height (PR #208)
  • sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.contains() no longer assumes that the font map contains a space (PR #208)
  • Rendering multiline text with the sdl2.ext.BitmapFont class now always splits lines using the newline (n) character. Previously on Windows, it would only split on Windows-style line endings (rn) (PR #208)

API Changes:

  • Updated and redocumented the stringify() and byteify() Python 2/3 compatibility functions to better handle bytes encoding/decoding and no longer require specifying an encoding type (defaults to UTF-8 if not manually specified) (PR #204)
  • The subsurface() function now allows subsurface areas to be specified using SDL_Rect objects and surfaces to be passed either directly or as a pointer (PR #204)
  • The sdl2.ext.pixels2d() and sdl2.ext.pixels3d() functions no longer raise an ExperimentalWarning (PR #204)
  • Updated the draw_line() and draw_point() methods of the Renderer class to accept coordinates as lists of (x, y) tuples or SDL_Point`s in addition to flat ``[x, y, x, y, x, y]` lists (PR #207)
  • Updated the draw_rect() and fill() methods of the Renderer class to accept coordinates as lists of SDL_Rects`s in addition to lists of ``(x, y, w, h)` tuples (PR #207)
  • Updated the copy() method of the Renderer class to accept an (x, y) tuple as a destination, inferring the destination width and height from the dimensions of the copied texture (PR #207)
  • Changed the index argument for the Renderer class to take the name of the reqested rendering back end as a string instead of an index for better clarity and cross-platform consistency (PR #207)

Deprecation Notices:

  • The sdl2.ext.open_url() function has been deprecated (PR #204)
  • The sdl2.ext.load_image() function has been deprecated, as it unexpectedly produces different surface formats depending on the backend used. New projects should use the new sdl2.ext.load_img(), sdl2.ext.load_bmp(), and/or sdl2.ext.pillow_to_surface() functions instead (PR #205)
  • The sdl2.ext.get_image_formats() function has been deprecated, as it gives inaccurate results in most cases (PR #205)
  • The sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.can_render() method has been deprecated (PR #208)
  • The sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.render() method has been deprecated in favor of sdl2.ext.BitmapFont.render_text(), which returns an SDL surface instead of a SoftwareSprite and ensures the output surface is in ARGB8888 format by default (PR #208)
  • The UIFactory and UIProcessor classes have been deprecated due to their complexity and maintenance burden. New functions and classes for creating GUIs with PySDL2 may be introduced in a future release (PR #209)
  • The FontManager class has been deprecated in favor of the new and more flexible FontTTF class (PR #210)

0.9.9

Released on 2021-09-02.

New Features:

  • Updated to wrap new functions and constants in in SDL2 2.0.16 (PR #190)

Fixed bugs:

  • Reverted the fix for (issue #139), which inadvertantly caused a serious bug that prevented usage of any non-software renderer with windows created using Window objects.

0.9.8

Released on 2021-08-06.

New Features:

  • Updated to wrap new functions and constants in introduced in SDL2 2.0.12 and 2.0.14 (PR #163 & PR #181)
  • Fixed DLL loading issues with Python installed from the Microsoft Store on Windows (PR #185)
  • Added informative errors for when the newest SDL2 binaries found on the system are too old to be used by PySDL2 (issue #165)
  • Added support for passing SDL_Rect objects to sdl2.ext.draw.fill() (issue #169)
  • Added support for passing SDL_Surface pointers directly to many sdl2.ext functions, removing the need to explicitly use the .contents attribute.
  • Added sdl2.ext.MessageBox, sdl2.ext.show_messagebox(), and sdl2.ext.show_alert() as Pythonic wrappers around the SDL2 MessageBox API (PR #188)

Fixed bugs:

  • Fixed NameError when calling SDL_SetColorKey, by @mgorny (PR #166)
  • Improved detection of SDL2 binaries on macOS, by @pvallet (PR #177 & PR #178)
  • Fixed a bug preventing sdl2.ext.font.BitmapFont from being able to render, by @namelivia (PR #181)
  • Fixed sdl2.ext.Window.show behaviour under Wayland (issue #139)
  • Fixed a minor bug with the helloworld.py example (issue #174)
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the line clipping functions in sdl2.ext.algorithms from working if top and bottom arguments were specified backwards (issue #101)

0.9.7

Released on 2020-02-15.

  • The minimum required SDL version is 2.0.5
  • The minimum required SDL_ttf version is 2.0.14
  • The minimum required SDL_mixer version is 2.0.1
  • The minimum required SDL_image version is 2.0.1
  • Improved compatibility with older SDL2 releases by raising informative exceptions whenever a function requiring a newer SDL2 binary is called
  • added support for loading SDL2 .framework binaries on macOS
  • added built-in support for pip installation of SDL2 binaries on macOS and Windows using pysdl2-dll
  • fixed issue #75: sdl2.SDL_JoystickGetGUIDString() and sdl2.SDL_GameControllerMappingForGUID() no longer cause a segfault on Python < 3.8
  • fixed bug preventing use of background color with wrapped text using sdl2.ext.FontManager.render() (PR #134)
  • fixed issue #112: allow easy moving and resizing of sdl2.ext.Window() objects through ‘position’ and ‘size’ attributes, added ‘open’ and ‘close’ methods to Window objects
  • fixed issue #126: the write method for RW objects created with sdl2.rw_from_object() now returns the correct value
  • fixed issue #130: SDL_RW* functions now accept pointers to RW objects
  • fixed issue #135: sdl2.SDL_GetPrefPath() and sdl2.SDL_GetPrefPath() now return bytestrings instead of pointers to strings.
  • fixed issue #136: sdl2.SysWMmsg now properly defined and accessable for syswm events.
  • fixed issue #148: added support for loading SDL2 .so binaries with numeric suffixes on Unix-like OSes (e.g. ‘libSDL2.so.2’)
  • fixed issue #152: restored compatibility with recent versions of PyPy
  • fixed transparency issues with pallete indexed PNGs (PR #159)
  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.10)
  • updated sdl2.sdlttf to include the latest changes of SDL2_ttf (release 2.0.15)
  • updated sdl2.sdlmixer to include the latest changes of SDL2_mixer (release 2.0.4)
  • updated sdl2.sdlimage to include the latest changes of SDL2_image (release 2.0.5)

Big thanks to all the GitHub users who filed bug reports and submitted pull requests for this release.

0.9.6

Released on 2017-09-30.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.6)
  • fixed issue #98: wrap sdl2.SDL_GetHintBoolean() correctly
  • fixed issue #99: wrap sdl2.sdlmixer.Mix_PausedMusic() correctly
  • fixed issue #104: sdl2.ext.Resources.scan() shows the correct path on errors now
  • fixed issue #106: fix TextureSprite.__repr__() for an unset center property
  • fixed some minor GC issues in sdl2.ext.sprite and sdl2.ext.font
  • fixed the __getattr__ implementation for sdl2.ext.ebs.Entity
  • fixed background colour handling for multiline text surfaces

0.9.5

Released on 2016-10-20.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.5)
  • fixed issue #94: added support for TrueType font collection (TTC) files
  • fixed issue #80: added flip and rotation support for TextureSprite objects
  • renamed sdl2.ext.Renderer.renderer attribute to sdl2.ext.Renderer.sdlrenderer. The renderer attribute is deprecated and will be removed in a later version.

0.9.4

Released on 2016-07-07.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.4)
  • updated sdl2.sdlttf to include the latest changes of SDL_ttf (release 2.0.14)
  • new sdl2.ext.Renderer.logical_size attribute to set or retrieve the logical pixel size of a renderer
  • fixed issue #48: be more noisy about DLL loading issues
  • fixed issue #65: misleading documentation for sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_line()
  • fixed issue #67: Return a proper error code, when unittests running as subprocesses fail
  • fixed issue #72: sdl2.video.SDL_GL_DrawableSize() not available on import
  • fixed issue #76: define missing SDL_PRESSED and SDL_RELEASED constants
  • fixed issue #82: examples/gui.py fails due to an attribute error
  • fixed issue #83: fix compatibility with newer PIL versions in sdl2.ext.image.load_image()
  • fixed issue #84: The setter of sdl2.ext.Renderer.scale works properly now
  • fixed issue #85: fix environment-dependent unit tests
  • fixed issue #87: fix incorrect MIX_INIT_* constants in sdl2.sdlmixer
  • fixed issue #88: use PILs Image.tobytes() instead of the deprecated Image.tostring()
  • fixed horizontical and vertical line drawing in sdl2.ext.line()
  • fixed a bug in sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_line() for odd numbers of points
  • dropped IronPython support

0.9.3

Released on 2014-07-08.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (HG)
  • new sdl2.ext.Renderer.scale attribute, which denotes the horizontal and vertical drawing scale
  • new sdl2.ext.point_on_line() function to test, if a point lies on a line segment
  • PYSDL2_DLL_PATH can contain multiple paths separated by os.pathsep to search for the libraries now
  • sdl2.ext.get_image_formats() only returns BMP image support now, if SDL2_image and PIL are not found
  • sdl2.ext.load_image() tries to use sdl2.SDL_LoadBMP() now, if SDL2_image and PIL are not found
  • fixed issue #55: sdl2.SDL_GameControllerAddMappingsFromFile() does not raise a TypeError for Python 3.x anymore
  • fixed issue #56: sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_line() and sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_point() handle multiple lines (or points) as arguments properly now
  • fixed issue #57: if SDL2_image is not installed and PIL is used, the loaded pixel buffer of the image file is not referenced anymore after returning from sdl2.ext.load_image(), causing random segmentation faults
  • fixed issue #58: raise a proper error, if sdl2.ext.FontManager.render() could not render a text surface
  • fixed issue #59: The sdl2.ext.TextureSpriteRenderSystem.sdlrenderer attribute is correctly documented now
  • fixed a local variable and module name collision in sdl2.ext.FontManager.render()

Thanks to Filip M. Nowak for the PYSDL2_DLL_PATH improvement.

0.9.2

Released on 2014-04-13.

  • fixed issue #32: the line clipping algorithms do not run into precision errors anymore
  • fixed issue #53 (again): sdl2.video.SDL_GL_ResetAttributes() is properly wrapped now to retain backwards compatibility with previous SDL2 releases
  • fixed issue #54: text input is correctly converted for the text entry component
  • updated the example BMP files, which could not be loaded properly on some systems with SDL2_image and PIL

0.9.1

Released on 2014-04-05.

  • fixed issue #50: corrected the sdl2.ext.load_image() documentation
  • fixed issue #52: sdl2.ext.Renderer.fill(), sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_rect() and sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_point() convert sequences correctly now
  • fixed issue #53: provide backwards compatibility for previous SDL2 releases by adding a wrapper func for sdl2.cpuinfo.SDL_HasAVX()

0.9.0

Released on 2014-03-23.

IMPORTANT: This release breaks backwards-compatibility. See the notes for the issues #36 and #39.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.3)
  • new sdl2.ext.subsurface() function to create subsurfaces from sdl2.SDL_Surface objects
  • new sdl2.ext.SoftwareSprite.subsprite() method to create sdl2.ext.SoftwarSprite objects sharing pixel data
  • the unit test runner features a –logfile argument now to safe the unit test output to a file
  • issues #36, #39: the different render classes of sdl2.ext.sprite were renamed
  • fixed sdl2.audio.SDL_LoadWAV() macro to provide the correct arguments
  • fixed issue #44: use a slightly less confusing ValueError, if a renderer argument for the sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory is not provided
  • fixed issue #43: improved the code reference for the improved bouncing section in the docs
  • fixed issue #40: typo in a RuntimeWarning message on loading the SDL2 libraries
  • fixed issue #38: the points arguments of sdl2.ext.Renderer.draw_points() are properly documented now
  • fixed issue #37: sdl2.SDL_GetRendererOutputSize() is now acccessible via a wildcard import
  • fixed issue #35: download location is now mentioned in the docs
  • fixed issue #12: remove confusing try/except on import in the examples

0.8.0

Released on 2013-12-30.

  • updated PD information to include the CC0 dedication, since giving software away is not enough anymore
  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (HG)
  • fixed a wrong C mapping of sdl2.rwops.SDL_FreeRW()
  • fixed various issues within the sdl2.ext.BitmapFont class
  • issue #26: sdl2.SDL_AudioSpec.callback is a SDL_AudioCallBack() now
  • issue #30: the SDL_Add/DelHintCallback() unittest works with PyPy now
  • issue #31: sdl2.sdlmixer.SDL_MIXER_VERSION() returns the proper version now

Thanks to Sven Eckelmann, Marcel Rodrigues, Michael McCandless, Andreas Schiefer and Franz Schrober for providing fixes and improvements.

0.7.0

Released on 2013-10-27.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2 (release 2.0.1)
  • fixed a bug in sdl2.ext.FontManager.render(), which did not apply the text color correctly
  • issue #14: improved the error messages on failing DLL imports
  • issue #19: the sdl2.ext.TextureSpriteRenderer.render() and sdl2.ext.SoftwareSpriteRenderer.render() methods do not misinterpret x and y arguments anymore, if set to 0
  • issue #21: sdl2.ext.load_image() raises a proper UnsupportedError, if neither SDL_image nor PIL are usable

Thanks to Marcel Rodrigues, Roger Flores and otus for providing fixes and improvement ideas.

0.6.0

Released on 2013-09-01.

  • new sdl2.ext.FontManager.size attribute, which gives a default size to be used for adding fonts or rendering text
  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2
  • sdl2.ext.RenderContext.copy() accepts any 4-value sequence as source or destination rectangle now
  • issue #11: throw an ImportError instead of a RuntimeError, if a third-party DLL could not be imported properly
  • fixed a bug in the installation code, which caused sdl2.examples not to install the required resources

Thanks to Steven Johnson for his enhancements to the FontManager class. Thanks to Marcel Rodrigues for the improvements to RenderContext.copy().

0.5.0

Released on 2013-08-14.

  • new sdl2.ext.FontManager class, which provides simple TTF font rendering.
  • new sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory.from_text() method, which creates text sprites
  • put the SDL2 dll path at the beginning of PATH, if a PYSDL2_DLL_PATH is provided to avoid loading issues for third party DLLs on Win32 platforms
  • minor documentation fixes

Thanks to Dan Gillett for providing the FontManager and from_text() enhancements and his patience regarding all the small change requests. Thanks to Mihail Latyshov for providing fixes to the documentation.

0.4.1

Released on 2013-07-26.

  • updated sdl2 to include the latest changes of SDL2
  • improved DLL detection for DLLs not being in a library path
  • fixed a bug in sdl2.ext.RenderContext.draw_rect() for drawing a single rect
  • fixed a bug in the repr() call for sdl2.ext.SoftwareSprite
  • issue #4: fixed a bug in sdl2.ext.RenderContext.fill() for filling a single rect
  • issue #5: fixed pip installation support
  • issue #6: fixed a bug in sdl2.ext.get_events(), which did not handle more than 10 events in the queue correctly
  • issue #8: sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory.create_texture_sprite() can create sprites to be used as rendering targets now
  • issue #9: improved error messages on trying to bind non-existent library functions via ctypes
  • minor documentation fixes

Thanks to Steven Johnson, Todd Rovito, Bil Bas and Dan McCombs for providing fixes and improvements.

0.4.0

Released on 2013-06-08.

  • new sdl2.sdlmixer module, which provides access to the SDL2_mixer library
  • issue #1: fixed libc loading for cases where libc.so is a ld script
  • updated sdl2 and sdl2.sdlimage to include the latest changes of the libraries, they wrap

0.3.0

Released on 2013-05-07.

  • new sdl2.sdlgfx module, which provides access to the SDL2_gfx library
  • new sdl2.ext.UIFactory.from_color method; it creates UI-supportive sprites from a color
  • fixed color argument bugs in sdl2.ext.RenderContext methods
  • fixed a module namespace issues in sdl2.ext.pixelaccess
  • sdl2.ext.SpriteFactory methods do not use a default size argument anymore; it has to provided by the caller

0.2.0

Released on 2013-05-03.

  • removed sdl2.ext.scene; it now lives in python-utils
  • fixed sdl2.haptic module usage for Python 3
  • fixed sdl2.SDL_WindowGetData() and sdl2.SDL_WindowSetData() wrappers
  • fixed sdl2.ext.RenderContext.copy()
  • fixed sdl2.ext.font module usage for Python 3
  • fixed sdl2.ext.line()
  • sdl2 imports all submodules now
  • improved documentation

0.1.0

Released on 2013-04-23.

  • Initial Release