Doing an Android FPS counter - android

I'm trying to do an FPS counter for any Android app. That means I don't have the source code for that app (I can't modify it or anything like that, I just have the .apk).
I've researched a lot into this and I've found only one app that does this (it's called Game Bench, you can find it on Google Play), so it is possible somehow. When the app starts, it has a list with all the games on your phone, you choose one and Game Bench automatically starts it and calculates the FPS. I need a similar behaviour.
Now, what I am asking is, if any of you has at least an idea of how I could calculate the FPS of an app (without writing code in it). Doing research I found a few vague ones, like record the screen and calculate FPS of the video, or somehow calculate the FPS using data collected with systrace. But on both these "ideas" there is very few info on the internet.
So please, if you guys have any information about this matter/ ideas/ opinions, I'll be happy to hear them. Thanks!

This is an example of how I would bench FPS using a Surface View.
Look at the Run method to see how the FPS works.
1: We get the time before update and render to the screen.
2: After all work is done we get the time again.
3: 1000 milliseconds is a second and 40 FPS is the norm.
4: elaspedTime = startTime - endTime;
5: So if elaspedTime is under 25 then its at-least doing 40 FPS.
6: If elaspedTime = 5 milliseconds then its doing 1000 / 5 = 200 FPS
7: You can sleep the thread for a couple milliseconds if you are running the updater and renderer on the same thread. That way you're not updating to many times.
8: Hope it helps this class is a basic game class that keeps the game running and 40 fps even if they are running it on a Galaxy S 6. You would want to make your own necessary changes to tweak it more.
public class MySurfaceView extends SurfaceView implements Runnable {
long time = 0, nextGameTick = 0;
SurfaceHolder myHolder;
Thread myThread = null;
boolean myRunning = false;
public MySurfaceView(Context context) {
super(context);
myHolder = getHolder();
}
#Override
public void run() {
while (myRunning) {
nextGameTick = System.currentTimeMillis();
if (!myHolder.getSurface().isValid())
continue;
Update();
Render();
time = nextGameTick - System.currentTimeMillis();
time = (time <= 0) ? 1 : time;
if (time <= 25)
sleepThread(25 - time);
Log.d("FrameRate", String.valueOf(1000 / time));
}
}
public void pause() {
myRunning = false;
while (true) {
try {
myThread.join();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
break;
}
myThread = null;
}
public void resume() {
myRunning = true;
myThread = new Thread(this);
myThread.start();
}
public void sleepThread(long time) {
try {
Thread.sleep(time);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
private void Render() {
// TODO Render to Screen
}
private void Update() {
// TODO Update
}
}

Related

Simple flip card game in Android using layouts instead of a surfaceview?

My project is to create a flip card game in Android like http://partyhatmy.blogspot.kr/2012/08/angry-bird-matching-card-game.html. The differences are that there will be 3 x 4 total 12 cards on the screen, and the game will have a timer. So if the timer expires or if the user finds all pairs, the new stage begins.
My problem is that I do know how to implement this using SurfaceView, but since all cards are at fixed positions, I think it might be possible to implement the game using layouts in xml, but I don't know how. Is there any starting point resource available on the web?
Edition 1
My Code is like this: I just first want to print the remaining time to one TextView to the screen. The problem is that the screen is all black (without runOnUiThread() invocation, the activity draws the given layout activity_game flawlessly.
public class GameActivity extends Activity {
private TextView mTimerTextView;
private int mRemainingTime = 30;
#Override
protected void onCreate(Bundled savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_game);
mTimerTextView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.remaining_time);
this.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
long lastSystemTime = 0;
mTimeTextView.setText(String.valueOf(mRemainingTime));
while (mRemainingTime > 0) {
if (lastSystemTime == 0) { // initial run
lastSystemTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
continue;
}
long currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
long elapsedTime = currentTime - lastSystemTime;
lastSystemTime = currentTime;
if (elapsedTime > 1000) {
mRemainingTime--;
mTimeTextView.setText(String.valueOf(mRemainingTime));
}
// To avoid excessive loop
try {
Thread.sleep(100);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
});
}
}
see this link it will help you with flip animation
Displaying card flip animation on old android
or
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/use-androids-scale-animation-to-simulate-a-3d-flip/
use this coode to do changes in ui thread
MainActivity.this.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
//do ui changes here
}
});

Time delays and game loop

I'm doing a simple match-3 game and I'm currently using a game loop like the code below. I'm using some frame calculations for optimal speed of th game. I took this from another game that I have done before. But this seems unnecessary for this type of game.
I need to have some time delays at several places, like when I have moved an object on the game area, I want a short time delay before the call to an method that check if there is a match of three objects in a row. And then I also need a short time delay when the code has detect a match, so that I can do some simple effect at those positions in the game grid before the user starts to move another object and then check for a match.
As it is now every thing happens at once and I wonder if it would be better to run this game without this calculations of frames and how I could do instead to get some time delays?
I have tested to use Thread.sleep(250) inside this code, but didn't worked the way I hade hoped for.
What could be a better approach for running a game like this?
// Game loop ---------------------------------------
#Override
public void run() {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
long beginTime;
long timeDiff;
int sleepTime;
int framesSkipped;
sleepTime = 0;
while (gameRunning) {
if (!surfaceHolder.getSurface().isValid())
continue;
try {
canvas = surfaceHolder.lockCanvas();
beginTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
framesSkipped = 0;
// Different game states
switch (gameState) {
case 0: // Intro game
drawStartPage(canvas);
break;
case 1: // Play game
canvas.drawRGB(0,0,0);
if(touchActionDown) {
touchActionDown = false;
colorObjectManager.checkPosition(touchX, touchY);
touchActionMove = false;
}
if(touchActionMove) {
touchActionMove = false;
colorObjectManager.swapObject(moveDirection);
// Time delay
colorObjectManager.checkMatch();
// Time delay
}
// Call method to draw objects on screen
colorObjectManager.drawObjectsList(canvas);
break;
case 2: // End game
break;
}
// Calculate difference from first call to
// System.currentTimeMillis() and now
timeDiff = System.currentTimeMillis() - beginTime;
// Calculate sleepTime
sleepTime = (int) (FRAME_PERIOD - timeDiff);
if (sleepTime > 0) {
try {
Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
while (sleepTime < 0 && framesSkipped < MAX_FRAME_SKIPS) {
// Call method to only update objects on screen
updateObjects();
sleepTime += FRAME_PERIOD;
framesSkipped++;
}
} finally {
surfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
} // End while-loop
}
// End game loop ---------------------------------------
I suggest use libgdx its a simple frameWork and you dont need to Calculate the DeltaTime.
AFAIK Dont use the Thread sleep on a surfaceholder use a seperate thread and lock the canvas.
you can use android animations. fadein fadeout to be fancy.
//some other method to delay
new Handler().postDelayed(new Runnable()
{
#Override
public void run()
{
// your code here
}
}, 1000/* 1sec delay */);
also got a very lame solution
//for 5 second of delay
for(int i=0;i<5000:i++){
for(int k=0;k<5000:k++){
for(int j=0;j<5000:j++){
}
}
}

Android surfaceview/canvas flickering after sleep in thread

This is my first post here. Sorry if it is not well done and thanks in advance.
There is something that is driven me crazy.
I try to draw something and show it slowly on screen. For this I use Thread.sleep as shown in the code. But it is showing two different versions of the canvas in each iteration.
Can anybody explain what is wrong?
I only want to draw something and after a few seconds draw something else. And so on.
This is my code:
public class Vista extends SurfaceView implements Callback {
private Hilo hilo;
private SurfaceHolder sf;
class Hilo extends Thread {
public boolean running;
private Vista view;
Canvas c = null;
Bitmap btm = null;
public Hilo(SurfaceHolder holder, Vista view) {
sf = holder;
btm = Bitmap.createBitmap(480, 800, Config.ARGB_8888);
c = new Canvas(btm);
}
#Override
public void run() {
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setStyle(Style.FILL_AND_STROKE);
paint.setColor(Color.BLUE);
int k = 0;
while (running) {
c = sf.lockCanvas();
k+= 10;
c.drawText(String.valueOf(k/10), k, 20, paint);
sf.unlockCanvasAndPost(c);
try {
sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
public Vista(Context context) {
super(context);
SurfaceHolder holder = getHolder();
holder.addCallback(this);
hilo = new Hilo(holder, this);
}
#Override
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width, int height) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}
#Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
hilo.running = true;
hilo.start();
}
#Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
boolean retry = true;
hilo.running = false;
while (retry) {
try {
hilo.join();
retry = false;
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
}
Your code is sleep()ing the Main thread, also known as the UI thread. This is something you absolutely mustn't do, as the main thread is responsible for handling all "stuff" in Android: UI rendering, UI event dispatch, etcetera. You can read the Processes and Threads guide on the Android Developer website for more information. Choice quote:
Thus, there are simply two rules to Android's single thread model:
Do not block the UI thread
Do not access the Android UI toolkit from outside the UI thread
The question then becomes, how do you animate a view without sleeping the main thread? The trick is to tell Android to go do something else and come back to you (redraw you) after a little while. Each time you draw, you calculate by how much to advance your animation.
One (crude) way to do this is with postInvalidateDelayed(long), which does exactly that: redraw your view after the given number of milliseconds. It's not a precise delay, it'll fluctuate a bit, so you can't assume that's exactly how much time passed. A way to do this is to store the System.nanoTime() in an instance field, so that the next time you're drawn, you can take the difference to a new reading of nanoTime(). This difference is how much time has passed and thus tells you by how much you should update your animation state. If your animation is supposed to last 1 second in total and 100 milliseconds went by since the last time you drew your scene, you must advance everything by 10%.
Android provides the a lot of utilities to make this easier.

Make calculations and drawing independent of CPU speed in Android's SurfaceView

To use a SurfaceView for drawing a 2D game in Android, I use this in the main activity's onCreate():
setContentView(new GameView(this));
Which is a reference to this class:
public class GameView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback
Additionally, I have a thread with its run() function:
public void run() {
Canvas c;
while (_run) {
c = null;
try {
c = _surfaceHolder.lockCanvas(null);
synchronized (_surfaceHolder) {
_panel.updatePhysics();
_panel.onDraw(c);
}
}
finally { // when exception is thrown above we may not leave the surface in an inconsistent state
if (c != null) {
_surfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(c);
}
}
}
}
In updatePhysics() I do some calculations. They are more complex than this simple example, of course, but work the same way:
public void updatePhysics() {
GraphicObject.Coordinates coord;
GraphicObject.Speed speed;
for (GraphicObject graphic : _allElements) {
coord = graphic.getCoordinates();
speed = graphic.getSpeed();
coord.setX(coord.getX() + speed.getX());
coord.setY(coord.getY() + speed.getY());
...
}
}
And in onDraw(), I draw everything to the canvas:
#Override
public void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
canvas.drawBitmap(BITMAP, xPos, yPos, null);
...
}
This works fine - everything. And when I tested it on my device, it looked pretty good. But when I gave it to someone else and he did a test game, the objects were moving much faster! Why is this so? Because the thread calls updatePhysics() as often as possible which means that fast devices call this function more often?
How can I prevent this and make the game equally fast on all devices? Something like this?
private long lastRun = System.currentTimeMillis();
public void updatePhysics() {
long millisPassed = System.currentTimeMillis()-lastRun;
...
float newCoord = (coord.getX() + speed.getX()) * millisPassed / 33;
coord.setX(newCoord);
...
}
Thanks for your help!
If you can, use the time directly to calculate all your physics. That would usually work best.
If you have no way to calculate based on time because what you are doing that is just step based and you know that generating the next step does not take much time then you have another option.
You create two threads. The first one advances the state at a fixed rate (and you have to be sure that this works on slow devices at that rate too). The second one takes the current state is sees and draws that. Now the second thread can be as slow as it wants because it simply skips some states (or draws the same state several times if it is faster).
Small example below has one thread that advances some state object and replaces the reference each time so the consuming thread does not need to worry that it's state object gets modified
class GameState {
private int state = 0;
public GameState advanceState() {
GameState result = new GameState();
result.state = this.state + 1;
return result;
}
}
class SurfaceViewImplementation extends SurfaceView {
// the current state
volatile GameState mState = new GameState();
void somewhere() {
Thread fastProducer = new Thread(new Runnable() {
private static final long MAX_WAIT = 1000 / 60;
#Override
public void run() {
while (!Thread.interrupted()) {
long timeBefore = SystemClock.currentThreadTimeMillis();
GameState newState = mState.advanceState();
mState = newState;
long timeAfter = SystemClock.currentThreadTimeMillis();
long timeSpent = timeAfter - timeBefore;
SystemClock.sleep(Math.max(0, MAX_WAIT - timeSpent));
}
}
});
fastProducer.start();
Thread slowConsumer = new Thread(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
while (!Thread.interrupted()) {
GameState currentState = mState;
longRunningDraw(currentState);
}
}
});
slowConsumer.start();
}
}
That will still fail to give you a speed independant result if the producing thread can't run at the desired rate.
I would save the time when I start rendering the frame(in your case is updatePhysics()), and then next time I would got to this point, I know how much time pass, if it's to fast you can use Thread.Sleep();

Android Development: Game background loop

I'm developing a 2d Game using Canvas/Surfaceview and have a problem with thread.
So what I want to accomplish is something in the background that is for example:
for each second SpawnEnemy() or ticking seconds or attacking.
I tried Thread.wait but that just cause pain and make my game 2fps.
here is my gameLoop:
import android.graphics.Canvas;
public class GameLoopThread extends Thread {
static final long FPS = 20;
private GameView view;
private boolean running = false;
public GameLoopThread(GameView view) {
this.view = view;
}
public void setRunning(boolean run) {
running = run;
}
#Override
public void run() {
long ticksPS = 1000 / FPS;
long startTime;
long sleepTime;
while (running) {
Canvas c = null;
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
try {
c = view.getHolder().lockCanvas();
synchronized (view.getHolder()) {
view.onDraw(c);
}
} finally {
if (c != null) {
view.getHolder().unlockCanvasAndPost(c);
}
}
sleepTime = ticksPS - (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime);
try {
if (sleepTime > 0)
sleep(sleepTime);
else
sleep(10);
} catch (Exception e) {}
}
}
}
So I want something that is ticking in the background (seconds) that doesn't thread.wait.
You should make your thread run the game normally about 60fps, see this example: How can I use the animation framework inside the canvas?
If you want for each second to do something then you either count frames in onDraw(), on each 60th frame do it, or if you need a greater precision then in each onDraw() check the system time and do something when a second has elapsed.
You should also consider using two methods one for drawing onDraw() and another for the game logic which are called from your thread.
you could use AsyncTask for something to run in background

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