Pygame update

SINE · March 2021

Hi,

I just wanted to ask whether the latest version of OpenSesame comes with pygame2.0. I tried to upgrade pygame in an older OpenSesame version and I was not able to do so. Is it even possible?

I am asking since the new pygame has quite cool functionalities for multi-touch responses and I would like to be able to use them within OpenSesame.

Many thanks!

lvanderlinden · March 2021

Hi @SINE ,

I'm tagging @sebastiaan to ask whether he could help out here.

Cheers,

Lotje

sebastiaan · March 2021

Hi @SINE ,

It depends on how you installed OpenSesame, but in most cases OpenSesame will use PyGame 1.9. You can see that when you start an experiment, because PyGame will print out its version to the console.

My own test environment actually uses PyGame 2.0.1, and I haven't experienced any issues with that. (I wasn't even aware of it, to be honest.) So you can try upgrading by executing the following command in the console (if this doesn't work, see this page):

!pip install pygame --upgrade

— Sebastiaan

SINE · March 2021

Hi Sebastiaan,

many thanks for your reply. Strangely enough, I see that my pygame version is 1.9.6 and that for some reason it recognizes inputs such as pygame.FINGERDOWN, and pygame.FINGERMOTION, which I thought should be available only from pygame 2.0.1 onwards.

I tried to upgrade pygame, but I get the message "Permission denied". I was wondering whether this may due to the fact that I am using OpenSesame with Python 2.7 and not 3.7.

Thanks a lot!

eduard · March 2021

Hi Sine,

The permission issue should be unrelated to the version of Python you use. It suggests that you don't have the permissions to write to directories on your system that Opensesame is trying to access during upgrading.

Perhaps it helps if you add the --user flag? This should install the package somewhere you have access to:

!pip install pygame --upgrade --user

(Maybe you have to remove the --upgrade part)

!pip install pygame --user

SINE · March 2021

Many thanks Eduard,

it works now! 🤗

I take this occasion also to ask you a doubt that came to me about drawing stimuli using the pygame/legacy back-end. From what I could understand, in Pygame you do not clear the canvas, but, everytime that you have to draw a new stimulus, you re-fill the display with the background colour and re-write onto it the new stimulus. I am coding an experiment with many trials (about 700). How does this work in terms of the timing of the experiment? Would the display keep in memory all the stimuli that are drawn onto it and therefore I may risk having an experiment that crashes? Unfortunately, I need Pygame to work with the touch responses, so I do not think that I have many alternatives (ps note that I have coded the experiment and I am using the inline scripts bits, so I am not relying on the sketchpads).

Apologies for the naive question, but I could not find information about this in the web.

Thanks!

SINE · March 2021

Also, do you believe that it is actually possible to register touch responses in opensesame by using pygame._sdl2 or is there any constraint that I would not be able to get around?

Thanks again for your precious help!

SINE · March 2021

Dear @eduard ,

going back to my original question about installing the last version of pygame, that works successfully:

pygame 2.0.1 (SDL 2.0.14, Python 3.7.6)
Hello from the pygame community. https://www.pygame.org/contribute.html

However, once I click run the experiment, not matter what I do (whether I restart or not), the experiment is by default run with pygame 1.9.6:

Starting experiment as ExperimentProcess-3
pygame 1.9.6
Hello from the pygame community. https://www.pygame.org/contribute.html
[2021-03-15 15:07:06,302:psycho:146:INFO] waitblanking = True
[2021-03-15 15:07:06,302:psycho:147:INFO] monitor = testMonitor
[2021-03-15 15:07:06,302:psycho:148:INFO] screen = 0
[2021-03-15 15:07:07,733:experiment:464:INFO] experiment started
[2021-03-15 15:07:07,733:experiment:468:INFO] disabling garbage collection
[2021-03-15 15:07:08,063:experiment:552:INFO] enabling garbage collection

Error while executing inline script

item: new_inline_script
phase: prepare
item-stack: experiment[prepare].new_inline_script[prepare]
time: Mon Mar 15 15:07:07 2021
exception type: ModuleNotFoundError
exception message: No module named 'pygame._sdl2'

This is strange, because if I type "import pygame" in the debug window, the version of pygame results to be 2.0.1. However, when I run the experiment with the green arrow pygame 1.9.6 "kicks in" and I cannot use the module pygame._sdl2, which is available just for pygame 2.0.1.

Do you know how I could solve this problem?

Many thanks!

eduard · March 2021

Hi Sine,

From what I could understand, in Pygame you do not clear the canvas, but, everytime that you have to draw a new stimulus, you re-fill the display with the background colour and re-write onto it the new stimulus

I am not entirely sure, but the way I read it is that filling the display is just another way of clearing it. In this sense, you could see clearing a window as similar to filling it with black, so that pygame just makes it explicit and, additionally, allows users to specify which color to use for filling, that is clearing the screen.

So, you should not experience increasing lags with increasing trial number (if this happened, that would be quite inacceptable behavior of pygame!)

Also, do you believe that it is actually possible to register touch responses in opensesame by using pygame._sdl2 or is there any constraint that I would not be able to get around?

I don't know this package, but if it is a Python package it most likely will work with Opensesame. You just need to install and import it. I suppose there are examples of how to interact with it? Then you could try to follow it and see how far you got.

However, once I click run the experiment, not matter what I do (whether I restart or not), the experiment is by default run with pygame 1.9.6:

That is a bit weird. The only reason I can see for that behaviour is that Opensesame ignores your local installation of Pygame. Why this would happen, I don't know. @sebastiaan do you have an idea?

As a dirty fix for now, you can try to reload your version of pygame once the experiment has started:

from importlib import reload  
reload(pygame)

That might work. No clue whether it will cause weird behaviour with the rest of Opensesame.

Let us know whether it works.

Eduard

sebastiaan · March 2021

Hi @SINE and @eduard ,

This is strange, because if I type "import pygame" in the debug window, the version of pygame results to be 2.0.1. However, when I run the experiment with the green arrow pygame 1.9.6 "kicks in" and I cannot use the module pygame._sdl2, which is available just for pygame 2.0.1.

This means that you have two versions of PyGame installed, and for some reason (possibly related to paths) it picks up a different version depending on the situation. As a first step, it would be useful to see where the packages are actually located. You can do that by running the following code in the console:

import pygame
print('PyGame {} is installed in {}'.format(pygame.__version__, pygame.__file__))

Which for me gives:

And then including the same code in an inline_script and running the experiment. That should tell you where the different versions of PyGame are located, and then you can probably remove them.

— Sebastiaan

SINE · March 2021

Dear @sebastiaan and @eduard,

many thanks for your answers. I have done as suggested, but for some reason pygame 2.0.1 does not seem to work on the computer with OpenSesame. The error that I keep getting is:

Traceback:
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame\Lib\site-packages\libqtopensesame\misc\process.py", line 158, in run
    exp.run()
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame\Lib\site-packages\libopensesame\experiment.py", line 451, in run
    self.init_display()
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame\Lib\site-packages\libopensesame\experiment.py", line 731, in init_display
    canvas.init_display(self)
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame\Lib\site-packages\openexp\canvas.py", line 64, in init_display
    cls.init_display(experiment)
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame\Lib\site-packages\openexp\_canvas\legacy.py", line 178, in init_display
    pygame.display.set_icon(surf)
error: directx not available

I checked online and there does not seem to be much about this problem. The weird thing is that I have a laptop with same drivers and same windows (10) as the computer in the lab and for the laptop everything works fine.

I have tried every possible attempt and asked help to the IT team here, but the problem persists. Would you have an intuition about what this problem may be about?

In any case, thanks for the help given so far, it has been very precious.

Best

sebastiaan · March 2021

Hi @SINE ,

I don't know where this error comes from. For me, on a Windows 10 machine, updating PyGame to 2.0.1 seems to work flawlessly. If I'd have to guess, I'd say that either the version of DirectX that is installed on your system is incompatible with PyGame, or that Python cannot find the necessary dll because of path issues. But those are just guesses!

-- Sebastiaan

SINE · April 2021

Many thanks @sebastiaan !

Just to let you know what the problem was (if someone encounters it in the future), there were two reasons why I was getting that error:

1) one of the graphic drivers of the computer was incompatible with pygame

2) one of the Eyelink files on the computer interfered with pygame. We have not understood yet specifically what file was causing this, but that seemed to be the problem.

The experiment is now running smoothly. Thanks for your support!

Best,

Caterina

sebastiaan · April 2021

Hi @SINE ,

Good to hear that you figured this out, and thanks for sharing!

— Sebastiaan

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