Question

I need to be able to move the mouse around while I am handling keydown events.

How do I do this?

Here is the basic code I am using right now:

import pygame, sys
from pygame.locals import *

pygame.init()

while True:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == QUIT:
            pygame.quit()
            sys.exit()
        if event.type == USEREVENT + 1:
            rotate = True;
        if event.type == KEYDOWN:
            if event.key == K_LEFT or event.key == K_a:
                moveX = -1*moveSpeed
            elif event.key == K_RIGHT or event.key == K_d:
                moveX = moveSpeed
            if event.key == K_DOWN or event.key == K_s:
                moveY = moveSpeed
            elif event.key == K_UP or event.key == K_w:
                moveY = -1*moveSpeed

I can’t move the mouse while the following script is running and I am pressing a key down..

Answer 1

The main problem with your loop is that you have no delay between “frames” – that is that you simply cycle over the event loop at maximum CPU speed – this makes a key press generate lots (lots meaning probably around millions magnitude) of key-down events that are read.

So:

1. insert a pygame.time.delay(x) inside your whiel loop, with x
   somewhere between 15 and 100 – this will give you so many
   miliseconds of pause between interations
2. insert a pygame.event.pump() call inside the loop – this will keep he event
   buffer flowing hapilly and prevent subtle bad behavior across
   different systems
3. this is not related with your issue – but,
   there is absotely no need of such a thing as “-1*moveSpeed” to
   obtain the negative value of a variable – just use “-moveSpeed”
   instead.

Also, this should stop the freezing, but pygame can only capture mouse or key events inside its own display window – which you are not initializing – you will have to call pygame.display.set_mode to actually see something.