Creating a window in pygame without displaying it

Question

I create a screen in pygame using:

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((width,height))

Then I draw 200 random gray scale circles on it and save the screen as an image. (I need to save this screen as an image so I can compare it to a target image later on):

pygame.image.save(screen, "Circles.png")

Now, I need to randomly change different parameters of different circles by putting the numpy array that contains the circle parameters for all the circles in a loop with a big number as its iteration value.

And I need to redraw the mutated circles on a screen (at the end of each iteration) and save that screen as a png image again.

Now the problem is, every time I use pygame.display.set_mode((width,height)) it opens up the display window and it significantly slows down my program.

I would like to create a screen and save it in a variable but don't need to display that screen at each iteration. I haven't been able to figure out what command to use to avoid displaying the screen.

I appreciate your help.

Answer 1

If you don't want a window to appear, try creating the surface like this:

screen = pygame.Surface((width,height))

Then you can draw your circles on this surface and save it the same way as you did before. As others have said, clear the surface with the fill() method.