okay, so I am making a basic space-ship game.

I can't get rotation to work because it scrambles the bitmap, but that's for another question.Should I even use a gif? any other filetype suggestions?

back to the actual point here, so:

k = pygame.key.get_pressed()

yeah, self explanatory. this doesn't work, as it returns each key as pressed.

so, somewhere else:

d = k[pygame.K_d]

and another line:

print d

and another:

if d:

So, k returns as each key on the keyboard pressed.

d returns 0 indefinitely, whether or not d is pressed.

d is always 0.

the statement about d therefore is never true.

Why is this happening?

You might be confused by what get_pressed() is actually doing. From the docs:

Returns asequence of boolean values representing the state of every key on thekeyboard. Use the key constant values to index the array. A True valuemeans the that button is pressed.

Getting the list of pushed buttons with this function is not theproper way to handle text entry from the user. You have no way to knowthe order of keys pressed, and rapidly pushed keys can be completelyunnoticed between two calls to pygame.key.get_pressed(). There is alsono way to translate these pushed keys into a fully translatedcharacter value. See the pygame.KEYDOWN events on the event queue forthis functionality.

In other words, when you call get_pressed(), you are getting a representation of the state of the keyboard at the time of get_pressed() being called.

For example, let's say one second into your game you call get_pressed(). You'll get back a structure that lists all of the keys on the keyboard and if they are pressed (they will all be false).

At two seconds into your game, you press a key. If you look at the same structure that you were looking at earlier, it will STILL say that everything is not pressed, because you're still looking at the state of the keyboard as it was a second ago. However, if you called get_pressed() again, you'd get back a new, updated structure, and this new structure should show that the key is pressed.

One way to solve this would be to do the following:

while True:# Update Stuff# Draw Stuffstate = pygame.key.get_pressed()# Now check the keys

Now, you're getting up-to-date information on the keyboard.

One thing that should be noted is that using the functionality above, you could STILL potentially miss a keyboard press. If the update functionality took a long time, a key could potentially be pressed then unpressed in a small enough time that you wouldn't have called get_pressed() when the key was down.

If this might be a problem, you will probably want to use the event loop instead. Something like...

is_moving = Falsewhile True:for event in pygame.event.get():if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN and event.key == pygame.K_d:is_moving = Trueelif event.type == pygame.KEYUP and event.key == pygame.K_d:is_moving = False