Hello friends!
I need to create a photo editor, which allow to put the emoticons, text and drawing with a brush on the picture.
Open the illustration
An editor must be able to change the position of smiles & text, their size and rotation with two fingers (multi-touch).
Mechanics is clear to me. I found ready realization of multi-controller:
https://github.com/lukehutch/android-multitouch-controller
But I don't understand how better visualize all the layers in terms of performance:
Layer 3 - text
Layer 2 - emoticons
Layer 1 - drawing
Layer 0 - photo
I am afraid to use the canvas, without your opinion. I heard that the canvas buggy when displaying a large number of images.
I found examples visualize the layers of images using layer-list with the 's inside. I think this method will be more performance numbers for my task.
But I have not found documentation of how to update the position (top / left) when you move an item.
My question is: What is the best use for the visualization of all layers and the possibility to save the final image (merge all layers)?
Please help, what to choose and what is the right path!
Thank you in advance! :)
Canvas is not buggy. It's the only way for you to render things onto a Bitmap. By the looks of your requirement, I think you need to draw your Layers onto different bitmaps. Layer 0 will be your default bitmap. Every other layer will be individual bitmaps on their own. The reason they have to be on a bitmap of their own is so that you can move them as you wish.
You final merge will be to draw all these bitmaps, on the default bitmap via Canvas.drawBitmap() call.
I'm making a new Android Game with LibGDX, a platformer but I'm having issues with TMX (Tiled) maps. I read a lot about tiles gaps problems with LibGDX but I can't make it work well.
Here is my problem: sometimes, when the character moves, I can see for on each tiles the end of the previous tile on the Tileset, in full screen on my computer it works well most of the time, but when I set the size of the window to the resolution of my smartphone (800x480px) that won't work.
Here's a video of this problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXaoE_YNpuA&list=UUE3Ty03UMwTh3hNIKx2Dmmw
And here's my tileset:
Have you got an idea about what can solve this problem ?
This is because of the blending that happens when you're scaling down the image (or rendering it at sub-pixel positions). To avoid it, you can add a 2-pixel spacing between your tiles and make sure the pixels in this space match the colour of the neighbouring tile edges.
Alternatively, try to disable the blending, but I can't tell you how to do that in LibGDX.
I'm working on creating a mobile app which overlays images on top of a google map.
I have a large number of image overlays ('GroundOverlay' objects in KML-speak). I'm running into several issues (mainly performance) when the map is scrolled or zoomed
Having tried several options, I think my next approach will be to combine all the image overlays into one image beforehand, and then simply display that image as a single overlay on the map. Problem is, I'm not sure where to start.
Does anyone have any experience in combining overlay images?
I think there are two problems that need to be solved
1) Calculate the larger 'bounding box' that will contain the final image. I have the bounding box for each overlay ('LatLngBox' in KML-speak), and I think the final box can be calculated by simply examining the values of each LatLngBox and generating the final box based on the min/max values. Anyone have any insight as to whether this will work?
2) Merge all the overlay images into a single final image. I have no idea where to start here such here. Generating the actual image isn't the problem, but rather where to place each overlay (ie pixel level) so that the resulting image is accurate.
Any tips/hints would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
the static overlay images can be combined and drawn. but the moving(regularly updated) overlay images would be an issue if you still want to combine them and post as one. the best option i believe would be to combine the static overlay resources and keep them in one set and other moving images drawn separately.
Managed to figure this out on my own.
Answer to (1): The technique I outlined in my question works perfectly
Answer to (2): You can convert between lat/lng and x/y pixels of an image as described here: Convert Lat/Longs to X/Y Co-ordinates
ok to clarify. i understand that the map data is basically some images grouped in bounding boxes and drawn on a 2d canvas. is it possible to rotate the whole view so that it looks like on the image i posted from google earth, to get a kind of fly-over look? i know that there is a class in adroid used for 3d rotations on images(the camera class Graphics.camera)
There was a nice tutorial not long ago from sony-erricson with their 3d listview describing its functionality, but i don't think i can achieve what i need with it. is there a way that a view can be rendered maybe on a GL surface?
i realize that this isn't that simple to do but any suggestions or ideas on the matter can be helpful.
so where do i start?
tnx.
Very straightforward with OpenGL. Use triangles laid out in a huge grid and texture map accordingly, setup a camera and you are done. You even get elevations etc right with heightmapped terrain.
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.