I'm trying to write a program with Python to emulate an 'old' online game in which you drive a worm through the screen with some inputs from the keyboard.
import turtle
# Set screen and background
wn = turtle.Screen()
wn.title("Turn with Left and Right buttons your keyboard. Click on screen to EXIT.")
wn.bgcolor("black")
# Snake settings
snake = turtle.Turtle()
snake.color("purple")
snake.shape("circle")
snake.shapesize(0.25,0.25)
snake.pensize(5)
snake.speed(10)
t = 0
# Define Go loop, turn Left and Right
def go():
t = 0
while t < 1000:
snake.forward(1)
t += 1
def left():
snake.circle(1,8)
go()
def right():
snake.circle(1,-8)
go()
# Inputs and Exit on click
wn.onkey(right, "Right")
wn.onkeypress(right, "Right")
wn.onkey(left, "Left")
wn.onkeypress(left, "Left")
wn.listen()
wn.exitonclick()
turtle.done()
The problem here is that, after some moves, the program crashes returning:
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object.
I'm still a beginner so i don't get what I'm doing wrong. How can I fix the error?
From testing, what is apparent is that if your go
function hasn't completed, and you are still holding down a key, it's called again, meaning that now there's two go
functions on the call stack (plus a bunch of other functions like eventfun
and update
). Because holding the key calls the go
function many times a second, and the fact that the go
function takes 8+ seconds to complete, you're filling up the call stack with calls to go
, hence the crash. The call stack is just something like this repeated over and over:
update, __init__.py:1314
_update, turtle.py:561
_update, turtle.py:2663
_goto, turtle.py:3197
_go, turtle.py:1606
forward, turtle.py:1638
go, script.py:21
left, script.py:26
eventfun, turtle.py:700
__call__, __init__.py:1892
Even holding down left for just 3 seconds, my call stack grows to over 600, which is really high.
To fix this you could make it so that left
or right
cannot be called again while that key is still held down. That's one possible way.