Time for action – accessing surface pixel data with NumPy

In this tutorial we will tile a small image to fill the game screen. Perform the following steps to do so:

1. The array2d function copies pixels into a two-dimensional array. There is a similar function for three-dimensional arrays. We will copy the pixels from the avatar image into an array:

   pixels = pygame.surfarray.array2d(img)

2. Let's create the game screen from the shape of the pixels array using the shape attribute of the array. The screen will be seven times larger in both directions.

   X = pixels.shape[0] * 7
   Y = pixels.shape[1] * 7
   screen = pygame.display.set_mode((X, Y))

3. Tiling the image is easy with the NumPy tile function. The data needs to be converted to integer values, since colors are defined as integers.

   new_pixels = np.tile(pixels, (7, 7)).astype(int)

4. The surfarray module has a special function (blit_array) to display the array on the screen.

   pygame.surfarray.blit_array(screen, new_pixels)

   This produces the following screenshot...