Changelog

This changelog tracks changes to Pygame Turbo. For the changelog of the original Pygame Zero, check below.

Running overview

New features

  • A proper mouse builtin to get the state of different mouse properties like positions, relative movements, state of buttons being pressed and more. Also allows changing of visibility, cursor shape and others.

  • Easy to use and feature rich controller support making coding games with controller controls easy while also allowing multiple controllers for multiplayer support with simple interfaces.

  • Convenience functions for clock that allow checking total elapsed time and saving timestamps with names and checking them / time elapsed since their creation.

  • clock.timescale property that allows slowing down, speeding up or pausing the game time. Integrating the different timescale with actor movements or other time relevant code is up to the user.

Feature enhancements

  • Pixel perfect collision check between two actors via actor1.collidemask(actor2).

  • Scaling actors and flipping their images both independently for X and Y.

  • width and height are now proper gettable and settable properties for actors. Alternative properties allow reading the dimensions of the actors bounding box when rotated.

  • Angle and target-based movement functions for Actors, similar to what is possible in Scratch and other environments.

  • Velocity property and movement function for Actors that only move in straigth lines. Also includes an intercept function to calculate necessary velocity to meet a target actor that also has a constant velocity.

  • Create Actors from simple shapes without needing an image, via Actor.Rectangle(width, height, color), Actor.Ellipse(width, height, color) and Actor.Triangle(width, height, color).

  • Function to check if an actor is currently withing the screen bounds: .is_onscreen().

  • More understandable error reporting for wrong positional values.

  • String color names are spellchecked to make fixing typos easier.

  • Schedule functions with arguments instead of only ones without any.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed music.is_playing() requiring an argument.

  • Fixed a bug where creating actors outside of functions in IDE mode (importing pgtrun and using pgtrun.go() at the end of the game file led to a crash because no display was initialized when image operations are performed by PGTurbo.

Dependencies

  • Switched the base dependency from pygame to pygame-ce as it is being developed more actively and causes fewer installation problems.

  • Removed the dependency on pyfxr for tone synthesis. The same functionality is now provided with numpy and pygame themselves.

1.7.0 - 2026-06-05

Added ability to schedule functions with arguments instead of only those without.

1.6.0 - 2026-06-04

Added timescale property to clock to allow easy control of game time.

1.5.0 - 2026-05-29

Added scaling and flipping support as well as making width and height proper settable properties.

1.4.3 - 2026-05-24

New clock functions around elapsed time.

1.4.2 - 2026-05-22

Better positional errors for actor creation.

1.4.1 - 2026-05-20

Fixed a crash in IDE mode when creating actors at the start of the file.

1.4.0 - 2026-05-19

Removed dependency on pyfxr and switched dependency on pygame to pygame-ce.

1.3.5 - 2025-09-23

This was the initial fork from Pygame Zero with different PRs being integrated to create the first state of Pygame Turbo.

Since Turbo was forked from Pygame Zero during its unreleased version 1.3 stage, its version numbering starts from 1.3.5 to avoid confusion.

Pygame Zero Changelog

The following is the changelog of Pygame Zero leading up to the forking of Pygame Turbo:

1.3 - unreleased

  • New: Actors can be made transparent by assigning to actor.opacity (based on work by Rhys Puddephatt and charlesej)

  • New: screen.fill() now takes gcolor, creating a vertical-linear gradient

  • New: a REPL has been added, which allows exploring a game’s state while it is running.

  • New: Added a storage API, which preserves data across game runs (based on work by Ian Salmons and Gustavo Ferreira)

1.2 - 2018-02-24

  • New: Actors can be rotated by assigning to actor.angle

  • New: Actors now have angle_to() and distance_to() methods.

  • New: Actors are no longer subclasses of Rect, though they provide the same methods/properties. However they are now provided with floating point precision.

  • New: tone.play() function to allow playing musical notes.

  • New: pgtrun.go() to allow running Pygame Turbo from an IDE (see Running Pygame Turbo in IDLE and other IDEs).

  • New: show joypad icon by default

  • Examples: add Asteroids example game (thanks to Ian Salmons)

  • Examples: add Flappy Bird example game

  • Examples: add Tetra example game (thanks to David Bern)

  • Docs: Add a logo, fonts and colours to the documentation.

  • Docs: Documentation for the anchor point system for Actors

  • Docs: Add Migrating from Scratch documentation

  • Fix: on_mouse_move() did not correctly handle the buttons parameter.

  • Fix: Error message when resource not found incorrectly named last extension searched.

  • Fix: Drawing wrapped text would cause crashes.

  • Fix: animate() now replaces animations of the same property, rather than creating two animations which fight.

  • Updated ptext to a revision as of 2016-11-17.

  • Removed: removed undocumented British English centrex, centrey, centre attribute aliases on ZRect (because they are not Rect-compatible).

1.1 - 2015-08-03

  • Added a spell checker that will point out hook or parameter names that have been misspelled when the program starts.

  • New ZRect built-in class, API compatible with Rect, but which accepts coordinates with floating point precision.

  • Refactor of built-in keyboard object to fix attribute case consistency. This also allows querying key state by keys constants, eg. keyboard[keys.LEFT].

  • Provide much better information when sound files are in an unsupported format.

  • screen.blit() now accepts an image name string as well as a Surface object, for consistency with Actor.

  • Fixed a bug with non-focusable windows and other event bugs when running in a virtualenv on Mac OS X.

  • Actor can now be positioned by any of its border points (eg. topleft, midright) directly in the constructor.

  • Added additional example games in the examples/ directory.

1.0.2 - 2015-06-04

  • Fix: ensure compatibility with Python 3.2

1.0.1 - 2015-05-31

This is a bugfix release.

  • Fix: Actor is now positioned to the top left of the window if pos is unspecified, rather than appearing partially off-screen.

  • Fix: repeating clock events can now unschedule/reschedule themselves

    Previously a callback that tried to unschedule itself would have had no effect, because after the callback returns it was rescheduled by the clock.

    This applies also to schedule_unique.

  • Fix: runner now correctly displays tracebacks from user code

  • New: Eliminate redraws when nothing has changed

    Redraws will now happen only if:

    • The screen has not yet been drawn

    • You have defined an update() function

    • An input event has been fired

    • The clock has dispatched an event

1.0 - 2015-05-29

  • New: Added anchor parameter to Actor, offering control over where its pos attribute refers to. By default it now refers to the center.

  • New: Added Ctrl-Q/⌘-Q as a hard-coded keyboard shortcut to exit a game.

  • New: on_mouse_* and on_key_* receive IntEnum values as button and key parameters, respectively. This simplifies debugging and enables usage like:

    if button is button.LEFT:

1.0beta1 - 2015-05-19

Initial public (preview) release.