I wanna start a new project. A little "Jump n Run", but I have questions:
The levels will be bigger than the screen. How can I make a big Layout and edit it?
And how do the view "follows" the player, if he moves.
I dont want code samples. I only want basic ideas how to do it.
I suggest you have a look at the SurfaceView. It allows you to render bitmaps to the screen. In your case you could create a bitmap that is larger than the screen and have the user navigate it with the use of their finger (so you'll also have to also use your touchscreen). Basically what you will be changing when the user wants to go to a new location would be the src rect parameter in the drawBitmap method.
I hope this gets you started.
You could specify the layout to whatever pixel size you want (even if it's larger than any screen size would be), and then use scroll views to allow the user to scroll to other areas of the screen. Check out the Android developer docs on horizontal scroll view.
Related
working on an app and The way I want to set it up is different than what I have ever done before. I want the main activity when launched into the app to exceed past the boundaries of the physical phone screen, and for the user to be able to swipe out to parts of the app that they can't originally see.
I am not sure what the terminology is or what methods or classes etc to use. Any info that could point me in the right direction would be great! Thanks!
Just some clarification:
I think what I'm trying to say is the second thing you talked about. Imagine if you place a iPhone for example in the middle of a piece of computer paper. What I want to achieve is to have the whole view the size of the paper, but only be able to see the size of the iPhone's screen at a time. So you can go up a little bit and see what was above the screen, or left or right
If you want more screens and be able to switch between them, use ViewPager.
If you want one large view bigger than screen, you can either combine ScrollView for vertical scrolling and HorizontalScrollView for horizontal scrolling, or make some custom View, which will be able to scroll (you have to implement it on your own) in both direction.
If you want to have just some views outside of the screen and bring them to visible area on some event, you can use RelativeLayout and set to its views proper margin.
If you want something else, add more information, how it should look and act like.
At the moment, I am using Euro 2012 app and it has some interesting layout parts. If you go to matches->knockout screen, you'll see 3 screens like this.
If you slide left or right, you move between them not like between one activity to another, but just like all these elements are laid on one big canvas and you slide each screen into focus. Even thou, if you slide left/right, the screen cannot be stopped in the way that half of each image is visible, so I guess it's not a big canvas. Somehow you can slide screen like one big image, and yet it always lock perfectly as if they used 3 activities for this.
How did the do this?
It's a ViewPager, available in Android support package and described in their blog.
The designing is not so much difficult, As i think to draw that boxes showing quarterfinals, semifinals.
They having layout( we can do by placing image in background also).
The major role played by FrameLayout which shows you that effect(emphasis), the flages are fetch from url as matches are decided(not essentially images only names are sufficient as flags came inside app and gets applied as updated).
After your click i think the start image gets change it's just replacing that image with new one.
As you said they are not on single canvas (but if they did customization of heir Viewpager that it's not stopping in between activities), but i think it's on single canvas.
If your taking about quickness of loading and all it's up to you as much code and processing you optimized it gives you smooth feel and fast processing.
We can appreciate the work but we can not say it's too much difficult as i think it's quit easy...
Hope this explanation helps you to understand ....
Is there a way to draw ontop of every view (like a watermark that shows everywhere for example)? sort of how the Dock4Droid app draws a a dockbar ontop of every screen.
Your best bet is to have a relative layout as your top level container. The very last item in your markup should be an imageview containing your watermark which you can then position on the screen anywhere you like.
As an alternative, you can do your own drawing (onDraw) and set the opacity value such that it gives the presentation of being translucent. Works for me with several of my requirements.
I don't think this is possible, as android app drawing is effectively sandboxed.
Even if you could, why would you want to? It seems like a major annoyance for your users. I know I would uninstall an app that did that.
I'm entirely new to Android development, and I'm interested in making a live wallpaper. I was thinking about looping a set of pictures instead of drawing the animation. Is this a possible approach? If possible is this a suitable or ideal way of doing it, does it eat up memory and would i need images with different resolutions because of the fragmentation?(hundreds of different devices)
Thanks in advance :)
Sure, it should be fairly simple.
The main part of the Wallpaper engine is the Drawing of course. You need to handle the drawing manually, there is no easy way to loop through images... you need to code it. You will have to continuously monitor the time which has passed and adjust the displayed image based on that. You are given a Canvas object to draw to and it is all done during run-time in code.
The Wallpaper engine class has a event called onSurfaceChanged which gives you the width and height of the Surface which you will be drawing to. It will be called everytime the screen dimensions change (like if the phone is put into Landscape mode for instance). You need to have code that will handle any combination of width or height for all the device types out there. You will need to decide if you are going to stretch, center, tile or crop (Or a combination of those) the source images to fit any particular screen size. I would recommend scale to fit so that the image is either taller or wider than the screen and center the image either vertically or horizontally (cropping the extra bits) once that is done. I personally just use one source size and resize it to fit. You can opt to use several source files if you want which is the recommended approach I believe, but it's a little confusing.
I would start by creating a Live Wallpaper which just draws something basic like a shape to the screen. Then work out how to display an custom image and take it from there.
Good luck
You will need to be very careful about memory if taking a frame approach to animation--probably will not be possible to animate full frames--much more practical to move sprites on a background. See, fr'instance: http://davidjhinson.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/scarce-commodities-google-android-memory-and-bitmaps/
what if you have a png frame animation that is set at a certain x and y position that sits in a spot on the background image, both would have to be rescaled
This might be a "duh" question but I'm going to go ahead and ask it anyway.
I have an oversized (bigger than the screen) RelativeLayout, and I'm using swipes to start a TranslateAnimation from viewing one part of the layout to another. Say for instance the layout is two screen wide and two screens tall. After the nice animation to shift the screen, I was using View.scrollTo() to set the new position. This works fine going from the first screen (top left at 0,0) to one of the others. When I swipe to animate back to the first screen though, because the View.scrollTo() invalidated that part of the layout (I assume), that part of the layout is all black as I animate through it. I tried a couple things to get it to redraw itself after the scrollTo() but haven't had any luck, so I figured I'd ask here.
thanks!
joe d
I can't help with your specific problem since I've never tried working with a layout bigger than the screen, but there might be another way to achieve what you're trying to do. If you simply want to be able to finger-swipe from one View to another, without ever displaying part of one screen and part of another (i.e. you aren't smoothly panning around a large View but rather just jumping from one distinct section of the layout to another), then these tutorials might help, here and here. They show you how to use touch events and the ViewFlipper widget to change between Views using animations.