Q:

Python - Pygame - rendering translucent text

I am using pygame.font.Font.render() to render some text. I'd like the text to be translucent, ie have an alpha value other than 255, so I tried passing a color argument with an alpha value (eg (255, 0, 0, 150)) as the color argument for pygame.font.Font.render() but it didn't have any effect. I also tried using pygame.Surface.convert_alpha() on the resulting Surface object, but that didn't do anything either. Any ideas?

A:

I'm not sure why, but after some experimentation I have discovered that the surface created with font.render cannot have it's alpha value changed.  Just blit that surface to another surface, and change the alpha value of the new surface.
textsurface=font.render('Test', True, (0, 0, 0))
surface=pygame.Surface((100, 30))
surface.fill((255, 255, 255))
surface.blit(textsurface, pygame.Rect(0, 0, 10, 10))
surface.set_alpha(50)
window.blit(surface, pygame.Rect(0, 30, 10, 10))

