What options are there for arranging custom ImageViews - android

I have recently completed a simple drag and drop shapes game. It had the user drag a shape (ImageView) to another "empty place holder" ImageView.
I now want to make this a little more advanced, instead of dragging a simple shape, I want to make a puzzle of various non-orthogonal shapes, for example breaking a circle into 5 different pieces. What I'm having a problem with right now is how to design the layout. I do not know how to make a truly "custom" shaped ImageView, as far as I can find from my research it's not possible. So my idea for now is to overlap a number of square ImageViews, each of which will have only a subset of an image and the rest transparent. Thus the final output will look like it's a number of custom shaped ImageViews.
Example:
+ + +
Because only the internal sections are "visible" and the rest of the circle is transparent, when all of these pieces are placed in the same spot on the screen, the final image will look like:
I haven't tried this yet... but I foresee at least one problem. When I go to drag the pieces over to this puzzle, they will all "snap" into place when dragged to the same place. Because in reality all I really have here is a picture of a circle inside a ImageView which has some invisible rectangular boundary around it.
Hopefully this situation is clear. Now my questions:
Is it possible to have truly custom shaped ImageViews instead of my idea of overlapping images?
If what I'm thinking is the best way to handle this puzzle idea, then what property can be changed such that the "drop" action does not happen at the same place for all of these puzzle pieces? If I wanted to "drop" the pizza shaped piece, I'd like it to only snap into place when it go close to the top left of the circle.
Note: I am new to Android programming, and somewhat new to Java/XML as well, it’s very likely I’m overlooking something, so please feel free to suggest other approaches as you see fit.

Not really. Overlapping views is generally the way it's done. You could also use one View and override the drawing action yourself (multiple bitmaps drawn at relative locations within the View), but that would make the drag-drop aspect significantly harder.
If the Views are all the same size, with the visible portions in the correct relative placement in each, they should snap together correctly. This is because the snap is (I believe) based on the position of the upper-left corner of the View. If the pizza-shaped piece's visible portion is correct with regards to that, it should snap in at exactly the right spot.

So you have certain places you want to accept the drops, and I'm assuming you know their coordinates, say (d_x,d_y).
Then why not simply monitor the coordinate of the center (p_x,p_y) of image view of the piece you are dragging, say the "pizza" piece, and when the distance between the the piece and drop point is within an acceptable amount accept the drop.
But if you are asking if there is some way to make non-rectangular image views I don't believe that is possible.
However I don't think it is necessary in your case, because I believe even if you want them to drag the piece precisely into place you can calculate the coordinates where the draggable rectangle needs to go with knowledge of the shape of the piece and the assumption that the rectangle wraps the piece.

Related

How do I let the user move a circle into another circles by dragging it in Android?

At the start I want the user to see:
The then want to give the user the choice to be able to drag H or C into the circle, so that it looks like:
This means while the user drags the H into the circles the other items that are already in the circle are have to move to make space for it. Ideally I would want them to be evenly distributed in the bigger circle. To have a nice UX I want the transition between the two images to be visible.
How do I best implement this UI?
the best way to do this is you use separate overlapping imageview to construct the big image and use separate imageview for each part image. then use imageview.setOnDragListener() for drag image and imgview.setOnTouchListener() to create shadow. study about this and you will definitely do it.

Android Game Development - Custom map leading to different activities

I'd like to create a custom map. It should be or look like one picture, but according to the part of which the user clicks, it should move the user to a different location (i.e. start a different activity). I've seen it done in several games but I don't know how to do it myself.
The part of the picture should have non-geometrical borders (obviously it would be easily done with many square images). Sadly, I don't even know what term describes what I want to do so I wasn't able to find any helpful tutorials or discussed topics.
Example:
Picture: http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff40/iathen/mapEx.png
If the user touches the purple slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_1
If the user touches the blue slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_2
If the user touches the green slide, (s)he should be leaded to activity_3
In my experience there are 2 main (most used) ways to achieve this.
The first (my favorite):
Get the data from a PNG
You should write multiple layers to a canvas. These layers constitute your "zones" (blue, green, purple in the image). To obtain the data of these areas, you get it from PNGs (with transparencies off course) to write the canvas with whatever you want. You must store the values where there can be a tap from the user (non-transparent areas). Notice that this values can be scaled up/down depending on the map size, screen resolution, map dimensions, etc.
Once you've written the layers to the canvas you should check for a match of the user tap and the stored areas you have. You should take into consideration here the order in which the user tap is processed in your code. For instance, in your image, the purple layer is on top so it must be processed first, the blue as second, and the green as the last one. This way you can have an "island" inside a bigger area.
The second way:
Generate the boundaries programmaticaly
I think this solution is self-explanatory. The only I've faced with this variant is that when the surfaces boundaries get messy, it's really complicated to generate the proper equations.
EDIT:
Using the first approach you can employ multiple PNGs to load data or use a single PNG with data coded into the bytes (i.e. RGB values). It's up to you to decide which one to implement.
Hope it helps!
Since a touchscreen itself isn't very accurate, your collision detection for the buttons doesn't need to be either. It would be a waste of time to try to make a complicated collision detection algorithm to detect a touch within those weird shapes.
Since you are making a game, I assume you know how to handle custom touch events, as well as canvas (at least). There are many ways to do what you want, but in the specific example image you linked is kind of a special case.
You could create a giant bounding circle around the three blobs, and then check if the user touched within the bounds of the circle (ie check if the distance from the touch to the center of the circle is less than or equal to the radius). Once you determine that it is, you could check which section of the circle it falls into by splitting it up into 3 equal sections. Requires some math, but shouldn't be that complicated.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it should be good enough. Although, you might have to change the buttons a little so they aren't so stretched out horizontally, otherwise a bounding circle wouldn't be ideal.
Personally, in my games I always have "nodes" that represent the visual elements of the game, such as buttons. Instead of using a large image like you are doing, I would create separate images for each button, and then check their collisions with touch events independently. That way I could have each button check with their own individual bounding circles, or, if absolutely necessary, I could even have custom algorithms for each individual button.
These aren't perfect solutions. If you do want a pixel-perfect solution, you'll need to implement some polygon collision detection algorithms
One thing to consider is screen size and ratio. The only constants you should use are for percentages.

Curved buttons and a circle

Hey I was wondering if there is any way to do this without going insane with lil buttons built up to make it but basically what I want to do is make two curved buttons around a circle one, is there any way of doing this?
Hers an example of what I kinda want, sorry for how crude the drawing is.
There are two parts in answering this question : how to have buttons looking like this, and getting the touch on the areas you draw.
For the first part, you can use a FrameLayout or a Relative Layout to draw your buttons exactly where you want, and custom images as background (maybe for the circle you can make a ShapeDrawable).
For the second part, it can be very simple : if the Circle (biggest button) is on top of the other two, then this can be ok. But I guess the touchable area on each button will be a rectangle.
Another way to do this is create a custom view, handle the Touch events yourself and based on the X and Y, detect which part has been touched

Overlay two bitmaps and rub out the top one

I'm having trouble trying to create a screen where I have two bitmaps (one on top of the other so it's totally obscuring the lower one) and "rub out" the top one so it reveals the bottom one under the path of the finger. I realise I may need 3 separate layers (bottom image, top image and then a custom view that handles the finger tracking) but I can't find a method of manipulating the middle layer from the custom view. Can anyone offer some advice on how I might do this?
You should do the whole thing in one View, see this SO question and its answer for more info and links.

How to animate views?

I'm working on a game that in some ways is similar to Tetris (imagine a 2D array of colored squares that sometimes move around)
I am trying to animate the individual squares so they will smoothly slide down from coordinate to the next. Since I wanted to use Android's built-in tweening feature, the animation has to apply to the whole View (rather than parts of it). This doesn't work well for me because I only want some of the colored squares to slide down, and the rest of them to stay still.
The (theoretical) solution I came up with to resolve this is to make 2 Views, layered directly on top of each other. The top view is for animating squares when they need to move, and the bottom layer is for the static squares. The animation-layer is transparent until I am ready to animate something. I then simply turn on the colored square in the animation-layer, tween it to the new location, and turn it back off when done. In the same time span, the static-layer just turns squares on and off at the right time to make the whole thing look seamless to the end user.
The proposed solution is just a theory, since I haven't been able to make it work correctly yet. Since I have been having trouble, I was wondering if this is even the best way to solve the problem? Perhaps there is a more elegant solution that I am over looking? Anyone know of a better way?
If you just want to animate a single element check out the namespace android.view.animation.Animation. You can also use Drawable shapes and draw them directly. Finally, if you want a simulation then you will have to look into threading. Basically you will create a timer to update the canvas for you based on an interval. There are some other view canvases you can use as well like the GLView canvas.

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