I want to add a few animated sprites to my application, drawn from spritesheets. There would never be more than three on screen at any time.
As I was researching this topic, I came across several technologies that support drawing and animating the sprites including lib gles, libgdx, cocos 2d etc...
However, because I believe I have a fairly simple use case, I was wondering if it is typically necessary to bring in these libraries to my project just to animate a few sprites? What is typically the recommended way to go about solving my problem that would not have a huge hit on performance?
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I want to make a "2d game" using graphics from the ressources for the characters.
Now I'm asking myself what is the best solution.
I was searching a lot in the net finding the two different options.
A) Creating a custom view, adding it to the layout showing a AnimationDrawable or
B) Using the SurfaceView directly painting on it
Whereas a) is usually called slow and unperformant for games I tried to find a solution for b).
But so far all tutorials are only made with one image moving around on the surfaceView or animating geometric shapes (which isn't really what I had in mind).
Finding tutorials for "how to draw AnimationDrawable on SurfaceView" are very rare.
So I thought I might load all animation frames of my character into an array drawing each call the right one on the SurfaceView. But that sounds like a lot of overhead to me. Should I abandon the SurfaceView?
Has anyone a good idea what would be the best way to animate - lets say 10 characters + "background" on my screen?
You have (at least) three options:
Draw on SurfaceView surface with a Canvas. This will use software rendering and be relatively slow.
Instead of a SurfaceView, draw on a custom View with a Canvas. This will be hardware accelerated, with some limitations.
Draw on SurfaceView surface with OpenGL ES. This will be hardware accelerated, but you have to figure out how GLES works.
You should also consider (4) use an open-source 2D game engine and don't worry about what it's actually doing.
If you want an example, Android Breakout is a simple but complete 2D game written for GLES and GLSurfaceView. A more evolved set of EGL/GLES helpers can be found in Grafika, which uses GLSurfaceView, SurfaceView, and TextureView to accomplish various things. It also demonstrates the use of the hardware scaler to improve efficiency on larger displays.
Long description of the Android graphics architecture is available here.
Okay, I'm not sure this is the best option but I found a tutorial for using "Sprite Sheets".
http://www.edu4java.com/en/androidgame/androidgame4.html
So far this seems to be a good solution. OpenGL seemed a bit too much to me but perhaps I'm not good at Shader Language etc.
So if anyone finds a better solution, please let me know.
I am looking at making a simple game. Without giving out the entire story, I need to draw two pieces of fruit (with arms and legs), who do different movements. They can do a few different actions (less than 5) and they also react to each others actions.
I'd like it to look simple. Very 2D, kids sort of graphics. Maybe shaded, but nice bright happy colours.
Let's say an action is to 'throw ball'. I'd like to see a semi smooth arm action. Smooth if possible.
So, I found a tutorial, which used sprites, and a PNG with 3 different states of a person walking. So, very basic. And I was able to make it walk across the screen, leading each part of the PNG for each state, and iterating through that over and over again, while moving the image.
I got pretty happy with my progress, and would like to base my game on that sort of model - but ... is using sprites, and loading areas of the PNG to make the image move correct? My PNG would be large if I want maybe 20 images just to throw the ball.
But if that's the right way to go, then great! It seems you can go with OpenGL and all that, but that's for 3D graphics right? Using sprites, and a few PNG with images would be OK for perforamnce and all that?
OpenGL is a valid choice for 2D or 3D, you shouldn't have any performance issues.
It will work fine for your game, and would likely be much smoother than trying to use android animations, which are not hardware accelerated on Android 2.x.
This is a big issue for me I'm trying to figure out for a long time already.
I'm working on an application that should include a 2D vector indoor map in it.
The map will be drawn out from an .svg file that will specify all the data of the lines, curved lines (path) and rectangles that should be drawn.
My main requirement from the map are
Support touch events to detect where exactly the finger is touching.
Great image quality especially when considering the drawings of curved and diagonal lines (anti-aliasing)
Optional but very nice to have - Built in ability to zoom, pan and rotate.
So far I tried AndEngine and Android's canvas.
With AndEngine I had troubles with implementing anti-aliasing for rendering smooth diagonal lines or drawing curved lines, and as far as I understand, this is not an easy thing to implement in AndEngine.
Though I have to mention that AndEngine's ability to zoom in and pan with the camera instead of modifying the objects on the screen was really nice to have.
I also had some little experience with the built in Android's Canvas, mainly with viewing simple bitmaps, but I'm not sure if it supports all of these things, and especially if it would provide smooth results.
Last but no least, there's the option of just plain OpenGLES 1 or 2, that as far as I understand, with enough work should be able to support all the features I require. However it seems like something that would be hard to implement. And I've never programmed in OpenGL or anything like it, but I'm willing very much to learn.
To sum it all up, I need a platform that would provide me with the ability to do the 3 things I mentioned before, but also very important - To allow me to implement this feature as fast as possible.
Any kind of answer or suggestion would be very much welcomed as I'm very eager to solve this problem!
Thanks!
In my view I have a simple ARGB drawable that takes about 2ms to draw but I can draw the same file as a bitmap in under 0.5ms (just some quick code, I can't really consider it an option). What are the best ways to optimize the drawing speed of a drawable?
It will depend on the number of drawables and how many times each gets drawn. For a small number, use canvas (an exact number will also depend on the device) I would suggest using Canvas as it's a nice higher level approach to drawing.
If you want to crank out a lot of images (think hundreds), I would suggest creating a GLSurfaceView and using openGL to render your images using VBOs tailored to your app. I would also recommend using a texture sheet if you go down this route since you'll get a huge increase in performance at the cost of code complexity.
But this will also depend on that type of app. My background is in game development so I use openGL exclusively for better performance. for a simple app (something along the lines of androidify) Canvas should be fine. If you want a simple tutorial for openGL, I suggest visiting Bergman's series of posts on the topic (google should give you a link for that). It is a nice intro to openGL.
I currently have a game written using the Android canvas. It is completely 2D, and I draw bitmaps as sprites on the canvas, and it technically works, but I have a few features that I need to add that will require drawing many more bitmaps on the screen, and there will be a lot more movement.
The app needs more power.
What is the best way to go from this method of drawing Bitmaps on a canvas to using OpenGL so I can draw them faster?
There are a couple platforms out there in the works for making 2d open gl games:
http://www.rokonandroid.com/
http://www.andengine.org/
Unfortunately neither is as well developed as it's iPhone equivalents (cocos2d-iphone), but they will help you get off the ground faster than trying to interface with openGL right off the bat yourself.
I think you can get good performance out of a canvas.. but it takes a lot of work..
if you start off with a good performance graphics library, then even if you get a lot of things wrong, you probably will still end up with good performance :) lol
there is a competition running for the fastest drawing library... libgdx is currently winning...
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/A-simple-game