Python 3 non-blocking synchronous behavior

Question

I'm making the classic atari snake game in python3 using Pygame. I want to spawn a subprocess to listen for key strokes so that whenever the player enters a key (UP, DOWN, LEFT, or RIGHT), the subprocess sends the parent process the key. But this pipe should not be blocking, so that the snake can travel in the direction it was traveling until the key is received.

I found Python's official documentation on multi-processes, but it does not describe the behavior I want, or at least doesn't document it as to whether if the example usages are blocking or not. Can someone give me an example of how this can be achieved?

Answer 1

You said:

I want to create an interface for an AI to take control of the snake. It wouldn't be fair if the state of the game is simply passed to the AI on each iteration b/c it could then just take as long as it want to compute the next move. Hence why it should be synchronous and non-blocking.

So to get what you want, you need an abstraction. In the example below, I created a Controller class that does that. KeyboardController handles keyboard input, while AsyncController starts a thread and uses the Queue class to pass the game state and the decision of the "AI" around. Note that you have to get pygame events on the main thread, so I do this in the main loop and simply pass the events down to the controller.

Your AI would have to be called by the worker function. As you can see, currently the "AI" in the worker function only acts every 0.5 second, while the framerate is 120. It doesn't matter to the game that the AI takes so long to make a decision.

Here's the code:

import pygame
import time
import random
from queue import Queue, Empty
from threading import Thread

class Controller():
    def __init__(self, color, message, actor):
        self.color = color
        self.message = message
        if actor: self.attach(actor)

    def attach(self, actor):
        self.actor = actor
        self.actor.controller = self
        self.actor.image.fill(self.color)

class AsyncController(Controller):
    def __init__(self, actor=None):
        super().__init__(pygame.Color('orange'), "AI is in control.", actor)
        self.out_queue = Queue()
        self.in_queue  = Queue()
        t = Thread(target=self.worker)
        t.daemon = True
        t.start()

    def update(self, events, dt):
        for e in events:
            if e.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
                if e.key == pygame.K_SPACE: self.actor.controller = KeyboardController(self.actor)

        self.out_queue.put_nowait((self.actor, events, dt))
        try: return self.in_queue.get_nowait()
        except Empty: pass

    def worker(self):
        while True:
            try:
                actor, events, dt = self.out_queue.get_nowait()
                if actor.rect.x < 100: self.in_queue.put_nowait(pygame.Vector2(1, 0))
                if actor.rect.x > 600: self.in_queue.put_nowait(pygame.Vector2(-1, 0))
                if actor.rect.y < 100: self.in_queue.put_nowait(pygame.Vector2(0, 1))
                if actor.rect.y > 400: self.in_queue.put_nowait(pygame.Vector2(0, -1))
                if random.randrange(1, 100) < 15:
                    self.in_queue.put_nowait(random.choice([
                        pygame.Vector2(1, 0),
                        pygame.Vector2(-1, 0),
                        pygame.Vector2(0, -1), 
                        pygame.Vector2(0, 1)]))

                time.sleep(0.5)
            except Empty:
                pass

class KeyboardController(Controller):
    def __init__(self, actor=None):
        super().__init__(pygame.Color('dodgerblue'), "You're in control.", actor)

    def update(self, events, dt):
        for e in events:
            if e.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
                if e.key == pygame.K_SPACE: self.actor.controller = AsyncController(self.actor)
                if e.key == pygame.K_UP: return pygame.Vector2(0, -1)
                if e.key == pygame.K_DOWN: return pygame.Vector2(0, 1)
                if e.key == pygame.K_LEFT: return pygame.Vector2(-1, 0)
                if e.key == pygame.K_RIGHT: return pygame.Vector2(1, 0)

class Actor(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.image = pygame.Surface((32, 32))
        self.image.fill(pygame.Color('dodgerblue'))
        self.rect = self.image.get_rect(center=(100, 100))
        self.direction = pygame.Vector2(1, 0)
        self.pos = self.rect.center

    def update(self, events, dt):
        new_direction = self.controller.update(events, dt)
        if new_direction:
            self.direction = new_direction
        self.pos += (self.direction * dt * 0.2)
        self.rect.center = self.pos

def main():
    pygame.init()

    actor   = Actor()
    sprites = pygame.sprite.Group(actor)
    screen  = pygame.display.set_mode([800,600])
    clock   = pygame.time.Clock()
    font    = pygame.font.SysFont("consolas", 20, True)
    dt      = 0
    KeyboardController(actor)

    while True:
        events = pygame.event.get()
        for e in events:
            if e.type == pygame.QUIT:
                return

        sprites.update(events, dt)
        screen.fill(pygame.Color('grey12'))
        screen.blit(font.render(actor.controller.message + ' [SPACE] to change to keyboard control.', True, pygame.Color('white')), (10, 10))
        sprites.draw(screen)
        dt = clock.tick(120)
        pygame.display.update()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Note that this implementation uses infinite queues. You want to add some logic to clear the queues so your games does not use huge amounts of memory.