my next project will be to develop a little game for android. In fact it will be more based on textual in- and outputs, so i don't need best hd graphics but nice looking "standard widgets".
I will mainly need Buttons, Checkboxes, RadioButtons, TextFields, SpinEdits so in general only the standard textual widgets. As i don't like the included ones in Android ("no looking cool enough", customization difficult, ..) i'm searching for alternative widgets or an possiblity to draw to them easily for example with an 2D framework. Themes are welcome.
Any hints?
you can use canvas, opengl or games engine, for example http://www.andengine.org/
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I'm porting a vector graphics editor from iOS to Android. The app must draw a complex hierarchy of graphical objects in an efficient manner, so that the graphics can be edited with gestures in real time. The edited work commonly consists of images, text and graphical primitives (lines, circles etc.). UI elements like selection highlights are rendered on a separate layer on the top.
On the iOS app, if one component of the graphic changes (for example a small text element changes its content), only that text element is re-rendered.
On iOS, we use CALayer objects from the CoreAnimation framework. This works very well. What framework can be used on Android for this use case? Is there an established "native" way to do that, or are usually third party frameworks used?
Android does not have similar thing out of the box. We do have core.animation but it is limited to simple behavioral animations. To create what you want you need to use SurfaceView or GLSurfaceView and help of clean OpenGL. You may also try to use ordinary Canvas of View - you will have limited possibilities though.
Also there are wrapper around OpenGl and SurfaceView like libgdx it is used mostly for games though - so it has much wider possibilities than you need, but it is less complicated than OpenGl.
Hope it helps.
A newbie question.
I am a newcomer to Java/Android (even UI development) .
My test apps look a little drab even though they do what the intend to do (with respect to app functionality).
Apart from Java, what are other technology needed for graphic rich app (oval 3d buttons etc).
PS: I did a lil research on this before coming here and found most of the questions were asked with respect to game development.But I am not interested in game development though.
In my history of making nice looking apps it usually all comes down to positioning the buttons and other things nicely and making custom images for buttons. If you want to simplify some things try using LIBGDX's UI tools. They allow a somewhat simplified way to load in custom images and scale/position them according to screen size.
I am looking for the best way to develop an Android app that has one component that allows the user to draw shapes, rotate them, scale them, slice them etc. (I am calling this component ActivityArea). In addition to this ActivityArea there need to be regular buttons, textViews, editViews etc. on the app.
I have explored 2 options - using libgdx and building a custom view. Both approaches appear doable. However, with libgdx, as far as I understand, all the buttons, textViews etc will also have to be created using the libgdx libraries. With this regard I have the following questions:
Is my understanding that libgdx will necessarily have to be used to render buttons and other regular android views?
Is there any way of including a libgdx powered view within an android layout?
Are there other libraries/options available that can be used to get geometric functions within an Android app?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
You can use Android UI atop LibGDX if you like. Typically for this you'd use the AndroidApplication.initializeForView(...) method to create the libgdx view and inject it into your layout.
As far as other libraries, if you doing 2d shapes and don't have to have a consistent 60fps, I'd probably just use Android's Canvas.
I'm trying my hand at making a platform game and have been thinking about what I would use to design levels.
I was thinking of using a tile palette that would contain the graphic tiles and their properties. And a similar palette that would contain sprites.
This way I could drag and drop tiles/sprites onto a grid and specify property values. This could all be saved to some kind of file that would be read by the game.
Without getting too into the details, is this a sound overall strategy? Is there anything major that I'm forgetting? Or perhaps there's a better method?
This is a rather open-ended question, but I don't think there is anything wrong with your approach. You might have to try a few things to find out what works for you.
When I make platform games I find it useful to be able to edit levels while I'm playing them, by adding in code to the game which allows me to select a graphic tile from a palette and paint it onto the screen. The behaviour is usually linked to the graphic for my games but you could paint behaviour as well. You then need code for your game to save levels as well as load them. Obviously, you would probably want to remove the editor before releasing the game.
I don't know how much experience you have with game dev, but if you're thinking about making a tile-based platform game then your best bet is leveraging existing libraries/tools to avoid "re-inventing the wheel". I highly suggest looking into open source libraries/tools because you can modify them to your liking. I've had some good experience with libgdx and AndEngine in which case both have TMX support which is a file format that can be used in conjunction with Tiled map editor. I personally like libgdx because it has javadoc and very actively developed, and also that it's a framework rather than engine which gives you more flexibility (although more coding in some aspects).
I'm looking for a good 3D rendering and animation engine for Android, what can be migrated into the new 3.x Fragments views - as I want it to be a simple View, not a whole-UI screen. What engine can do this easily? My needed features would be simple animations (rotation), lighting, material change.
Unfortunately, it's hard to say what will be future proof in terms supporting upcoming features such as 3.x Fragment Views. But that being said, we've been taking a look recently at RightWare Kanzi for a different approach for handling our rendering and animation on Android. Take a look at their website and product sheets for their product offering that consists of Kanzi, Kanzi Studio and the Kanzi Engine. At the very least, I know they can accommodate rotation, lighting and material changes.
I would suggest jMonkey, a big advantage is that you can run it on Desktop+Android, so development is more comfortable