   Need help with screen "blinking"
  Ok this might be difficult to explain but the effect i'm seeing is like blinking and hints of vertical retracing. The part where it shows up most is a part of the background where its mostly white except for 1 pixel thick lines. There it almost looks like when the screen scrolls it gets a lot darker, but if you pay closer attention you can see horizontal lines flickering in and out. How my painting works is this:clear back buffer-> draw on back buffer -> blit back buffer to front buffer -> diplay.flip()I don't believe the back buffer is necessary since pygame/SDL automatically do it automatically I believe, but i'm just being extra sure. I've tried to also use software surfaces (SWSURFACE) and got nothing better. Also my animation feels kind of jerky in general. I use a variable frame rate but I have a max. Switching the max between 20 and 60 doesn't seem to make a difference in this simple zelda style rpg. I'm ready to try anything, oh and i'm using pygame.   
  Sounds like a classic case of tearing to me, due to vertical synchronization "v-sync" being disabled. I don't know about pygame, but somewhere in the initialization there should be an option to enable v-sync. If not, try forcing it to ON in your graphics card's display driver control panel and see if it fixes it.   ;  I think maybe your third step is unneeded.clear back buffer-> draw on back buffer -> blit back buffer to front buffer -> diplay.flip()should be:clear back buffer-> draw on back buffer -> display.flip();  Yeah like i said the third step is unnecessary but I put it in there for debugging purposes to see if software debugging might be able to help at all. So it turns out that pygame does not have a default way to vsync. It also turns out that my open source ati driver does not have a way to vsync. After some digging I found the problem is a lot deeper. It turns out that X11 has no standard way allowing for one to wait for a vertical retrace.http://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=406This is so weird to me because X11/SDL has been around forever and so many games have been written for SDL and linux, and now it turns out that all of them have this flickering effect, however it may be more obvious in certain types of games. I've been reading that I can bypass this issue if I use opengl as a backend. Does anyone have any experience interfacing pygame/SDL with opengl? Is this complicated? Would it be easier to just rewrite the code using pyglet or something?   ;  alright i'm getting desperate, does anybody know of any way to enable vsync in a linux python application without opengl?   