Develop Reference

scaling images in libgdx only once

In my android game, I am using images of fixed resolution lets say 256x256. Now for different device screens, I am rendering them by calculating their width and height as appropriate for that device.
Assume that on galaxy note2 I calculated width=128 and height=128... similarly for different devices, width and height will vary.
This is how I created texture..
....
imageTexture = new Texture(...);
....
in render()..
....
spriteBatch.draw(imageTexture,x,y,width,height);
....
So, every time when I call draw() method, does libgdx/opengl scale image from 256x256 to 128x128, which I think, yes!
Is there any way to tell opengl/libgdx to calculate all scaling only once ?
I have no idea how images were rendered? loaded into memory? scaled etc ?
How does Sprite in libgdx work? I tried understanding the code of Sprite and looks to me like they are also getting image width and height and then scale it every time, even though they have setScale() method.

First rule of optimizing: get some numbers. Premature optimization is the root of many problems. That said, there are still some good rules of thumb to know.
The texture data will be uploaded by libgdx/OpenGL to the GPU when you invoke new Texture. When you actually draw the texture with spriteBatch.draw instructions are uploaded to the GPU by OpenGL that tell the hardware to use your existing texture and to fit it to the bounds. The draw call just uploads coordinates (the corners of the box that defines the Sprite) and a pointer to the texture. The actual texture data is not uploaded.
So, in practice your image is "scaled" on every frame. However, this is not that bad, as this is exactly what GPUs are designed to do very, very well. You only really need to worry about uploading so many textures that the GPU has trouble keeping track of them all, you do not need to worry much about scaling the textures beforehand.
The costs of scaling and transforming the four corners of the sprite are relatively trivial next to the costs of sending the data to the GPU and the cost of refreshing the screen, so they probably are not worth worrying about too much. The "batch" in SpriteBatch is all about "batching up" (or gathering together) a lot of coordinates to send up to the GPU at once, as roughly, each call out to the GPU can be expensive. So, its always good to do as much work within a single batch's begin/end as you can.
Again, though, modern machines are stupidly fast, and you should be able to do whatever is easiest to get your app running first. Then once you have something working correctly, you can figure out which parts are actually slow and fix those. The parts that are "inefficient" but are not actually measurably impacting your application can be left alone.

Andengine background image performance

I'm having some trouble using a sprite as background for my scene. I'm setting the background as follows:
Sprite bg = new Sprite(SCENE_WIDTH/2 , SCENE_HEIGHT/2, this.mParallaxBackRegion,getVertexBufferObjectManager());
bg.setCullingEnabled(true);
mScene.setBackground(new SpriteBackground(bg));
Loading of the texture:
this.mParallaxBack = new AssetBitmapTexture(this.getTextureManager(), this.getAssets(), "gfx/_fixed.png", TextureOptions.BILINEAR);
this.mParallaxBackRegion = TextureRegionFactory.extractFromTexture(this.mParallaxBack);
this.mParallaxBack.load();
The png I'm loading is a completely black 960x640 image (same as my scene size), for testing purposes. However, setting the background causes my fps to drop from 60 (when not using the background) to 45 on my HTC Desire. I've tried multiple ways of setting the background, but all seem to be causing the same performance hit. Why does this affect the performance so drastically, and is there something I can do about this?

That is strange that you should get such a big performance hit. But here's one thing to try. Since i seems you likely have other things drawn to the screen besides this background, add the background to the same Texture. OpenGL works faster when there are fewer textures. When openGL has to draw from another texture its switches context *(citation needed) which is a slow operation. So having all your sprites on a single texture makes GL draw calls more efficient.
This alone is not likely to explain the performance problem.
It could also be your antialiasing setting: TextureOptions.BILINEAR.
Bilinear is the highest quality setting. Try using DEFAULT or NEAREST_PREMULTIPLYALPHA and see if that doesn't help.
Also, set your background to ignore updates.
One last thought:
The HTC desire is a fairly old phone at this date (released in 2010) the performance will be in part due to it being an old phone with an old version of android. I test on an HTC incredible, about the same vintage, and you have to be very conservative with your image sizes on that device.
Did you know that you can make your andengine native size 1/2 of the screen size and scale it up using a RatioResolutionPolicy? I used that approach for my first andengine (GLES1) project and had great success on that generation of devices.https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plonzogame&hl=en

Android Canvas Off Screen Drawing Performance

I'm developing an Android game using Canvas element. I have many graphic elements (sprites) drawn on a large game map. These elements are drawn by standard graphics functions like drawLine, drawPath, drawArc etc.
It's not hard to test if they are in screen or not. So, if they are out of the screen, i may skip their drawing routines completely. But even this has a CPU cost. I wonder if Android Graphics Library can do this faster than I can?
In short, should I try to draw everything even if they are completely out of the screen coordinates believing Android Graphics Library would take care of them and not spend much CPU trying to draw them or should I check their drawing area rectangle myself and if they are completely out of screen, skip the drawing routines? Which is the proper way? Which one is supposed to be faster?
p.s: I'm targeting Android v2.1 and above.

From a not-entirely-scientific test I did drawing Bitmaps tiled across a greater area than the screen, I found that checking beforehand if the Bitmap was onscreen doesn't seem to make a considerable different.
In one test I set a Rect to the screen size and set another Rect to the position of the Bitmap and checked Rect.intersects() before drawing. In the other test I just drew the Bitmap. After 300-ish draws there wasn't a visible trend - some went one way, others went another. I tried the 300-draw test every frame, and the variation from frame to frame was much greater than difference between checked and unchecked drawing.
From that I think it's safe to say Android checks bounds in its native code, or you'd expect a considerable difference. I'd share the code of my test, but I think it makes sense for you to do your own test in the context of your situation. It's possible points behave differently than Bitmaps, or some other feature of your paint or canvas changes things.
Hope that help you (or another to stumble across this thread as I did with the same question).

android view or surfaceView, which should i use?

Ive been trying to make a scrollable/zoomable app and everything has gone great except for drawing bitmaps. It is a very large image (6656 by 4096) that i have split into tiles. There is a rectangle array that the bitmaps are drawn to, and it detects what rectangle is in the top left corner so it can draw the bitmaps that will cover the user's viewable screen. My problem is this all lags when the app has to load the bitmaps into memory; Once they are loaded it isnt an issue. I started with 512 by 512 tiles, then went down to 128 by 128. although it helped, there still is some noticeable lag. I have been looking into surfaceView and wanted your opinions if i should stick with View, or use surfaceView to solve my lag.

If you derive your own SurfaceView you have several advantages.
Mainly because you can have all drawing logic in a seperate thread. This means that the ui won't wait for you (I'm assuming the lag is because the ui-thread is being blocked?).
SurfaceView's are also faster in nature.
I also find this overview on developer.android.com to be a good reference to choose drawing method.

Android scrolling background of bitmap tiles

I'm tried to determine the "best" way to scroll a background comprised of tiled Bitmaps on an Android SurfaceView. I've actually been successful in doing so, but wanted to determine if there is a more efficient technique, or if my technique might not work on all Android phones.
Basically, I create a new, mutable Bitmap to be slightly larger than the dimensions of my SurfaceView. Specifically, my Bitmap accomodates an extra line of tiles on the top, bottom, left, and right. I create a canvas around my new bitmap, and draw my bitmap tiles to it. Then, I can scroll up to a tile in any direction simply by drawing a "Surfaceview-sized" subset of my background Bitmap to the SurfaceHolder's canvas.
My questions are:
Is there a better bit blit technique than drawing a background bitmap to the canvas of my SurfaceHolder?
What is the best course of action when I scroll to the edge of my background bitmap, and wish to shift the map one tile length?
As I see it, my options are to:
a. Redraw all the tiles in my background individually, shifted a tile length in one direction. (This strikes me as being inefficient, as it would entail many small Bitmap draws).
b. Simply make the background bitmap so large that it will encompass the entire scrolling world. (This could require an extremely large bitmap, yet it would only need to be created once.)
c. Copy the background bitmap, draw it onto itself but shifted a tile length in the direction we are scrolling, and draw the newly revealed row or column of tiles with a few individual bitmap draws. (Here I am making the assumption that one large bitmap draw is more efficient than multiple small ones covering the same expanse.)
Thank you for reading all this, and I would be most grateful for any advice.

I originally used a similar technique to you in my 'Box Fox' platformer game and RTS, but found it caused quite noticeable delays if you scroll enough that the bitmap needs to be redrawn.
My current method these games is similar to your Option C. I draw my tiled map layers onto a grid of big bitmaps (about 7x7) taking up an area larger than the screen. When the user scrolls onto the edge of this grid, I shift all the bitmaps in the grid over (moving the end bitmaps to the front), change the offset of grid, and then just redraw the new edge.
I'm not quite sure which is faster with software rendering (your Option C or my current method). I think my method maybe faster if you ever change to OpenGL rendering as you wouldn't have to upload as much texture data to the graphics card as the user scrolls.
I wouldn't recommend Option A because, as you suggest, the hundreds small bitmap draws for a tiled map kills performance, and it gets pretty bad with larger screens. Option B may not even be possible with many devices, as it's quite easy to get a 'bitmap size exceeds VM budget' error as the heap space limit is set quite low on many phones.
Also if you don't need transparency on your map/background try to use RGB_565 bitmaps, as it's quite a lot faster to draw in software, and uses up less memory.
By the way, I get capped at 60fps on both my phone and 10" tablet in my RTS with the method above, rendered in software, and can scroll across the map smoothly. So you can definitely get some decent speed out of the android software renderer. I have a 2D OpenGL wrapper built for my game but haven't yet needed to switch to it.

My solution in a mapping app relies on a 2 level cache, first tile objects are created with a bitmap and a position, these are either stored on disk or in a Vector (synching is important for me, multithreaded HTTP comms all over the place).
When I need to draw the background I detect the visible area and get a list of all the tiles I need (this is heavily optimised as it gets called so often) then either pull the tiles from memory or load from disk. I get very reasonable performance even on slightly older phones and nice smooth scrolling with no hiccups.
As a caveat, I allow tiles not to be ready and swap them with a loading image, I don't know if this would work for you, but if you have all the tiles loaded in the APK you should be fine.

I think one efficent way to do this would be to use canvas.translate.
On the first drawing the entire canvas would have to be filled with tiles. New android phones can do this easily and quickly.
When the backround is scrolled I would use canvas.translate(scrollX, scrollY), then I would draw individualy one by one tile to fill the gaps, BUT, I would use
canvas.drawBitmap(tileImage[i], fromRect, toRect, null) which would only draw the parts of the tiles that are needed to be shown, by setting fromRect and toRect to correspond to scrollX and scrollY.
So all would be done by mathematics and no new bitmaps would be created for the background - save some memory.
EDIT:
However there is a problem using canvas.translate with surfaceView, because it is double buffered and canvas.translate will translate only one buffer but not the second one at the same time, so this alternating of buffers would have to be taken into account when depending on surfaceView to preserve the drawn image.

I am using your original method to draw a perspective scrolling background. I came up with this idea entirely by accident a few days ago while messing around with an easy technique to do a perspective scrolling star field simulation. The app can be found here: Aurora2D.apk
Just tilt your device or shake it to make the background scroll (excuse the 2 bouncing sprites - they are there to help me with an efficient method to display trails). Please let me know if you find a better way to do it, since I have coded several different methods over the years and this one seems to be superior. Simply mail me if you want to compare code.