pyGame in a thread

Question

I want to use a pyGame program as a part of another process. Using the following code, pyGame doesn't seem to be processing events; it doesn't respond to the 'q' key nor does it draw the titlebar for the window. If go() is not run as a thread, it works fine. This is under OSX; I'm unsure if that's the problem or not.

import pygame, threading, random

def go():
  pygame.init()
  surf = pygame.display.set_mode((640,480))
  pygame.fastevent.init()

  while True:
    e = pygame.fastevent.poll()
    if e.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and e.unicode == 'q':
      return

    surf.set_at((random.randint(0,640), random.randint(0,480)), (255,255,255))
    pygame.display.flip()

t = threading.Thread(target=go)
t.start()
t.join()

Answer 1

It's best to do the event handling and graphics in the main thread. Some environments really don't like you trying to render from other threads, and some don't like you trying to drain the event queue from them either.

It may not even be possible to do what you're hoping to do, since the process you're running within may well have its own ideas about who owns the message queue and the window you're rendering to.