Develop Reference

Making a game overlay in python

So I am trying to make a python script that when I do a certain hotkey combination, It shows a text box as an overlay like what "Geforce Experience" and "Windows Gamebar" do.
the problem is that in the game when I interact with the text-area loses focus and goes minimized as opposed to the 2 programs I spoke about before, for example windows game bar allows you interact with a lot of options while the game is still on foreground and you close the bar you are left with whatever you were with before...
I'm using tkinter for now, and if there are solution not including tkinter it is Ok as long as it achives the goal.

As far as I understand what you are trying to do is create a overlay for a game and the overlay should be created using tkinter object. Here is a library that can do that, however as far as I remember you needed to change something in it's python file, however this might have already been fixed.

VTK Render Mouse Interaction (Python)

I want to visualize one or more STL file(s) using a vtk render viewport inside my application. I was able to get it all running with this example here: https://kitware.github.io/vtk-examples/site/Python/IO/ReadSTL/
My question is as follows: I have a mouse to control it and it is just unbelievable how bad default the controls of the camera are. It is almost impossible to get the model rotated intentionally or focus on a certain part. I am confused as I could not find any topic here or elsewhere discussing this. Normally I would read through other threads to find an answer, but there doesn't seem to be any. So, maybe you can point me to an approach or even certain functions of how I can change these settings, that would be really great! Basically I want to mimic the camera behavior of say, Paraview or a common CAD tool. Like zooming with mouse wheel, rotating with RMB and holding down the wheel to pan.
Some background on my project: I have written a python program and created a quite ok UI using tkinter. However, recently I was thinking of rewriting some basic parts of it and also upgrading everything visually and in terms of handling. So, I want to move to Qt widgets and, there shall be a VTK rendering viewport inside my application to show some of the stuff that can be interacted with.

I was able to find a solution in the tutorials. By explicitly defining the vtkInteractorStyle with
style = vtk.vtkInteractorStyleTrackballCamera()
The handling is just as I wanted it to be.

Python : How to deal with threads priority in Gtk3

I am building an user interface using Python, Gtk3 and Glade. I want to change several things on the UI at the same time (i.e start an animation and display a new text) which leads to the application freezing.
I have read that Gtk wasn't thread safe so I didn't used the Thread module.
Instead, I used Glib.idle_add and Gdk.threads_add_idle functions. I am tryig to update a treeview, display some text and show an animated logo at the same time. The application works but it freezes a few seconds and then everything appears at the same time. I try to set different priorities to the threads but it does'nt seem to fix it.
Gtk.threads_add_idle(Glib.PRIORITY_DEFAULT, label.set_text, "text_to_set")
Gtk.threads_add_igle(GLib.PRIORITY_DEFAULT, function_to_display_logo)
I expect the different texts and the treeview and the logo to be displayed without any freeze. Does anyone know how I can fix that ?

Please have a look here at a script example in https://github.com/f4iteightiz/UWR_scoreboard : a GTK window is updated all 0,2s for example (countdowns of several timers appearing in labels; I think anything else could be updated) and it stay reactiv the whole time. No freezing noticeable.

I found out what my error was. I was using the GLib.idle_add function too many times even in some cases where I had no use for it.
For example in the main code I had :
Glib.idle_add(my_function,buffer)
but my_function looked like this :
def myfuntion(buffer):
GLib.idle_add(buffer.set_text,"text")
I deleted the GLib.idle_add call in the main code and now it works perfectly.

How to remove icon from QMessageBox in PyQt5?

I am trying to code a message box that just pops up and says something and has a single button to close it however as I only have a small amount of text in the box the icon/image to the left of it is huge and looks bad. I want to know how to remove it. I am also having trouble making custom message boxes. Tutorials say that this is how you make a custom message box:
box = QMessageBox()
box.setText('text')
box.addButton(QPushButton('Close', self))
box.exec_()
However this just closes my program and returns a 1. My current code uses the about method of QMessageBox():
box = QMessageBox().about(self, 'About', 'This is a test Program')
However this has that large icon in the text window and I can't seem to do anything else to the box as it just stops the program and returns 1 again
I am in desperate need of some decent PyQt documentation. I can't seem to find documentation on much at all unless it is in C++. For instance I cannot seem to find any information of options other than question and about for QmessageBox. So if someone could also show me where some proper documentation lives it would prevent me asking too many questions here

Rather than PyQt documentation, it is better to directly use Qt documentation. You only need to switch your language mindset from Python to C++, there and back. It is not that difficult. :) See e.g. http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmessagebox.html#addButton or http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qmessagebox.html#about I think this is very detailed documentation, unrivaled by most other frameworks.
Note that there are three overrides of addButton(). From the documentation it seems that you either need to pass two arguments to box.addButton(QPushButton('Close', self), QMessageBox.RejectRole) (you forgot the role!) or better, you use the override which uses standard buttons, then you only pass one argument: box.addButton(QMessageBox.Close).
And one more tip for you: I also find it easier to debug my program with PySide than PyQt because unlike PyQt, PySide catches the exception, prints that to console and keeps running. While PyQt usually just silently crashes leaving you clueless. Most of the time, I am using shims Qt.py https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Qt.py/0.6.9 or qtpy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/QtPy to be able to switch from PyQt to PySide on the fly. It also allows switching between Qt4 and Qt5 bindings easily.

How to remove Mayavi toolbar in python using code

I have several Mayavi plots that I am combining in a single window (along the lines of the documentation), and it would be much better if I could get rid of the toolbars in all of them. While it's possible to to right-click each of the toolbars to have them disappear, I would like to code them to disappear instead. A command like scene.hide_toolbar() would be ideal. I've dug around in the TraitsUI package a bit to no avail... anybody know how to make it go away?

You can use Handler to modify UI, the following code works with ETS_TOOLKIT=qt4. Add the DisableToolbarHandler class to the code multiple_mlab_scene_models.py, and show the UI by m.edit_traits(handler=DisableToolbarHandler()).
class DisableToolbarHandler(Handler):
def position(self, info):
for name in ["scene1", "scene2"]:
editor = info.ui.get_editors(name)[0]
editor._scene._tool_bar.setVisible(False)
m = MyDialog()
m.edit_traits(handler=DisableToolbarHandler())
The windows shows as: