How to Code Classic PONG in Python Using Pygame!! Part 2 - Computer AI Controls and Ball Movement!!

what's going on you guys welcome back to the channel and today we've got kind of a fun one for you we're going to learn to build the classic game pong the game that pretty much started modern video games we're going to learn to recreate that in python using pygame up and down controls all set so next thing i want to do is get the computer to track the ball and then i want to get the ball moving uh so let's see for that um i think we should make the computer's location uh the next thing that we update so we're going to have to create a new function and call it um i'll call it update ai because that sounds hardcore but for this we are going to be passing in the ball's y coordinate and the computer's current y coordinate and then we're going to get the computer's y coordinate back so based on where the ball is the computer is going to update um where it is accordingly so let's go ahead and create that function and we called it update ai great name i always use ai instead of computerized opponent because it makes me feel really advanced um obviously you can probably tell from my code that i am not really advanced but hey works for me okay so um just so i don't forget what i'm passing back i always uh kind of write the last line as well so uh we are going to pass in ball y and let's go ahead and just in here let's make a computer speed equal to we'll give them three they can't be as fast as the player as the player you should always behave like you are the code's god i guess okay so computer speed of three and then what do we wanna do we wanna check if the computer's y coordinate now you gotta think um it's 30 pixels wide right and really the way a computer would play this is to get into the optimal placement so it doesn't just want the ball somewhere over the paddle it wants it dead in the center so there's room for error so let's say if the computer plus 15 which again think about the coordinate system going from zero at the top to 300 at the bottom so plus 15 is going to be in the middle of the paddle and if that is greater than the ball's y position and we'll say plus 5 because again the ball is 10 wide so what do we want to do if the computer mid section is farther down the screen than the ball's mid section is we want to computer y minus equal computer speed right okay and then we will say else computer let's do l if um so l if computer y plus 15 is less than ball underscore y plus five and in that case that's saying that the we need to go down the screen so then we want computer y plus equal to computer speed all righty and i actually think that's gonna handle it um but what you'll see is this isn't really going to do much yet because the ball isn't moving so i'm just going to set the ball y equal to zero when i start this up we should see the computer move to get to it bam and then it freaks out because it's just bouncing around but cool so um it appears that that works oops it appears that that's working pretty good but once we get the ball moving and bouncing um it should work a lot better so let's go ahead and um oops let's go ahead and move on to um the ball so i will create a function that i'm going to call update ball update ball i'm not completely sure yet what all it's going to need passed in and what all um it can do without so let's just start writing it and we'll kind of flesh it out as we go so update ball and inside this function it's going to basically take a look at uh let's let's separate into x movement and y movement and say uh if ball x direction so we'll need to create a variable saying whether the x uh is right or left so um if it's equal to one that means that we're telling it to go right and the x coordinate is less than what do we want less than 290 i suppose let's see we're going to start by drawing it to bounce off all the walls and then we'll handle the collision with the paddles second so if ball x direction is equal to 1 and the ball x coordinate is less than 290 then we are going to say ball x plus equal to and let's do another variable called ball speed so what i'm seeing here already is we're going to need to pass in ball x direction ball y direction ball x coordinate and ball y coordinate and then ball speed as well so obviously we haven't made a lot of those variables yet we're going to create the function for updating it and moving it and then we'll go ahead and kind of work backwards to create the variables um that's how i want to do it there's obviously other ways to do it so code it however you want but let's just go ahead and say if the direction is 1 and the ball is less than 290 and then let's say if direction is negative one and x is greater than zero then the ball is going to move to the left by the speed okay so now we've got back and forth handled let's take care of up and down and say if ball wide direction actually we also need to handle what happens when it hits those extremes so my mistake let's do a l if ball x direction is equal to one so we're telling it it should go right but now ball x is greater than or equal to that 290 marker that means it's hit the right wall so what we need to do is change ball x direction okay so we're gonna go ahead and multiply it by negative one and that's why i like using one and negative one rather than zero and one um you can actually update uh direction just by multiplying times uh minus one which is really handy like when you want it to collide with a paddle you say well whatever direction you were moving moving the opposite now so that is pretty cool and then for moving to the left we're going to you need an and for moving to the left we're going to add if ball x direction is equal to negative one and then it's gone all the way to the left we'll flip it just the same okay so now we need to sort of do the same thing for ball y well pretty much exactly the same thing for ball y so i am going to go ahead and copy this guy completely and we're going to change some x's to y's and then uh i think we should handle the ball's speed in the y direction different than the speed in the x direction it's just my sense of things you can make them one variable if you want uh i think it'd be a little more fun to have x and y um update it slightly different times so you get kind of slightly different paths of travel okay so hopefully what we've done is we've just created a ball that bounces around in the extremities in the off of all the walls and what we want to do is just return ball x and ball y for now i think we'll see we might need to return more but this should get the ball moving get the ball rolling i know that was bad okay so we need to go create four variables um ball x uh ball x direction and we'll start it out moving to the right ball y direction we'll start it out moving down and ball speed we'll make it two and ball y speed which we'll make that uh we'll make that two as well for now paul why speed but do we pass that in yep okay all righty well i'm just gonna run it and kind of let the code tell me what i did wrong so it looks like we get into the bottom right and it tries to bounce back to the left once but then immediately tries to go back to the right so let's take a look here at our ball control if it's going to the right and it's less than 290 just add it on but then if it's going to the right and it's greater than or equal to 290 multiply times negative one um if it's negative one call x minus equal ball speed um i don't know why it would be this but i'm gonna just try oh yes i do okay stupid mistake no surprise there but we aren't actually able to update ball x direction and ball y direction um unless those exist outside of this function so right this every time this gets called it pulls these variables in independently and uh we weren't returning them so what we need to do is not just bring back ball x and ball y but also ball x direction and ball y direction and now it should bounce around all happy like all right sweet we could try to follow it uh it's bouncing straight into the corners which is rad so there you can see why like i kind of like the idea of doing a different x and y speed it'll give you a little more interesting of a bounce pattern but the other cool thing that you can see right now is the ai is tracking it and following it so we haven't put in the code yet to handle like bouncing off of the paddle and bouncing off of your paddle but you can tell like your computerized opponent is going to be tracking it pretty good so let's actually do that next you