My game, Hidden Treasures, has been on the market over two months now. Recently a customer presented a new problem that has never happened before.
According to the customer,
In their words:
"There was a diagonal line across it, and it was like
the image was backward so that the right side of the line showed what
was supposed to be on the left, and the left side showed what was
really on the right. Like if you switched them, it would show the
proper image. The image itself is slanted as well (from top left to
bottom right, at the same angle as the division line)"
I have never heard of this before, and have no idea how to fix it.
The app is a hidden object game, it uses a canvas for all the drawing as I did not know OpenGL ES at the time I made this game.
Basically, its got two bitmaps,
the size of the screen,
1680x1050.
It draws a chunk from the big one onto the small one, then it draws all the hidden objects over that, then displays it to the screen.
I don't understand how it could even mess up at all. Its drawing a screen sized image to the screen, and it doesn't happen on any other phone to my knowledge.
Any ideas? It doesn't force close so I don't have a stack trace
Related
I have an Android tablet using Android 11.0 that I want to draw with. I purchased a stylus that is compatible with Android. The pen works on the tablet.
However, trying to draw with the tablet does not feel natural.
The actual output is shifted to the right, instead of directly underneath the stylus pen.
Is there a way to customize how your Android touch screen device responds to touch input? Does an app like this already exist? Is this even possible? I have tried calibration apps in the Play Store and they have done nothing to solve my issue. I basically want a way to "remap" the coordinates of touch input so it is shifted to the left, therefore being directly underneath my pen.
Example photo
Pictured below, the red line is a straight line created with a ruler.
The yellow line is me attempting to draw as directly down the center of the red line with the pen, using the black line as a guide to show you where I was attempting to draw the yellow line.
You can see how the output line (yellow) is shifted to the right, when where I actually was drawing was over the black line.
We're hitting a wall at the moment, trying to get a full release of our game and one of the things that's catching us just at the minute is a weird issue where we see blocks instead of text on an area,
What it's supposed to look like, "YOU" "RIVAL",
We're only experiencing it after on second entrance to the scene shown, but I have seen the issue occur before, on another app, Reddit is Fun (Android only),
No idea what's happening, doesn't happen on other devices, OSs, or in the Editor and nothing's showing up in the logs, but without being able to pinpoint it, it's a bit of a blocker to us releasing.
Yeah, so this is a weird one. The text goes all wrong if the z scale of the text ever gets set to 0, and changed from that point.
This text was animated, just scaled down to invisible after the first entrance to the scene, so if we restarted the race, the text had been scaled back to it's normal size, but because it had been 0, it was obviously wrong.
So, two ways to get around it, first choose not exactly 0, choose 0.001 or something, and then hide it prevents this from happening, or because it's a 2D object, you can choose to just scale down the x and y scale, but not the z.
I am using LibGdx to develop a game. For Now I am not using scene2D. I am struck up in increasing the levels of the game as I do not have the scrolling screen.
I like to design a a scrolling screen as it is in many games which are level based (for ref, lets say Candy crush). Could you please point me a example on how to have such a scrolling screen to show a bigger area where I can show many levels.
Thanks is Advance !
Using the Scene2D function is not necessary for this and is more for GUI implementation and different screens. The Scroll pane really shines when creating reading content that does not fit your phone. I do advice to start learning Scene2D to create MenuScreens and UI though.
What Candy Crush "simply" does is having multiple backgrounds that are placed next to each other and tile seamlessly. They use buttons in the correct place for levels. By dragging a finger across the screen the camera will move in that direction. For the movement from one level to the next there is probably something like a spline in play.
It is important only to draw the background tiles and buttons that are actually visible on the screen if you have many. Since these have fixed positions and you know your camera area and position you can calculate what to draw and what not. Just drawing everything each frame is likely to slow down your fps.
You can do a search on:
Tilemaps, for you backgrounds but you probably want them in just one direction so a simple 1D array would suffice.
Dragging, to move your camera. Here I gave a basic explanations on how I do it.
Splines, are a bit tougher and you do not really need them. They could be used to animate or move something along a curve.
Thats all, expecting you know how to create something like a button (click a sprite).
I have an app that's currently working with a single stage but i need to add a side display/section as a HUD, with scores/lives etc on it, so that the HUD is on the left, and the main hand screen on the right. The main game screen will be fixed and will not move around.
From researching I've found a couple of solutions.
1 - two stages
2 - a group with two groups to it, possibly using a horizontalgroup
3 - two cameras one stage
4 - one stage, one camera, but changing the position of the camera for each set of actors.
I think, option 1 is my preference, but i have some questions.
Do stages always fill the whole screen, or can i start then where i want? This would make it easier for the right hand screen to calculate positions based on 0,0 of that screen rather than always having to add the width of the HUD on to any calculations.
Do i need to work about viewports? Currently I'm not using one (which i think means my stage is set to scaling by default) but nothing looks stretched as a result of this. I don't know much about viewports, but there always seems to be a compromise to be made with them, i.e. black bars top or sides.
If I have two stages, do they each have their own camera? Do I need to with about this? Can I possibly aim the right hand camera at an offset so i can still draw things from 0,0 with that being the bottom left corner of the right stage, not the whole screen?
Finally, off topic, I am a little confused about spritebatch. I'm not currently using one, because I use a stage. Is that OK, or should i still be using one in conjunction with a stage somehow? And add all my actors to that?
It I understand correctly, you're using scene2d for your game world and also for your HUD. And the HUD doesn't overlay the game world, but rather uses its own portion of the screen exclusively.
Stages do not always fill the whole screen. They have no concept of filling or not filling anything, because they can have objects that are being drawn off screen. However, they are clipped to a rectangle defined by their Viewport.
In your case, it seems you need two Viewports, and therefore, two stages. You say you aren't using a Viewport, but you are...Stage automatically creates its own ScalingViewport that's set up like a StretchViewport. (ScalingViewport is not mentioned in the documentation, which is out of date.) StretchViewport is usually bad because your game will be distorted to fit whatever the aspect ratio of the device is.
ExtendViewports do not cause black bars as long as you don't set a max width/height on them and I think are usually the best choice for any game world view.
You can set your two Viewports to cover specific parts of the screen that you calculate yourself. Since this is a specialized case, I think you will have to directly subclass the Viewport class (not one of its subclasses) and manipulate each of them using viewport.setScreenBounds(...).
Regarding your last question: yes, each of the two stages has its own Viewport, and each Viewport has its own camera. Once you set up your two Viewports to each have their own portion of the screen, you can also set them to treat their respective bottom left corners as 0,0.
Currently I am doing app allowing user to draw. Simple think, just extend Canvas class and most of the thing is done.
That was my initial thinking and idea. But as the canvas is rather small because this is only what user see on the screen there is not much possible space to draw. Going through documentation I found translate() method allowing me to move canvas. What I did find out is when I move it, there is some kind of blank space just as you would move piece of paper. I understand that this is totally normal, as I've said before - canvas is only "the screen".
My question is - is there a possibility to make something like infinite canvas so you can make a huge painting and move everything around?
Before this question I was thinking about two things how something like this can be done:
Move all objects on canvas simultaneously - bad idea, because if you have a lot of them then the speed of moving is very bad.
Do something similar as it is done in ListView when you move it (or better see on the screen) only views that are on the screen together with one before and one after are loaded to memory and rest is uploaded dynamically when needed. I think this is the best option to achieve this goal.
EDIT:
Question/answer given by Kai showed me that it is worth to edit my question to clarify some of the things.
Basic assumptions about what can be done by user:
User is given opportunity to draw only circles and rectangles with some (around 80%) having drawable (bitmap) on them on canvas.
I assume that on all screens there will be maximum 500-800 rectangles or circles.
First of all thinking about infinity I was thinking about quite big number of screens - at least 30 on zoom 1x in each side. I just need to give my users bigger freedom in what they are doing.
On this screen everything can be done as on normal - draw, scale (TouchListener, ScaleListener, DoubleTapListener). When talking about scaling, there is another thing that has to be concerned and connected with "infinity" of canvas. When user is zooming out then screens, or more precise objects on the invisible "neighbours" should appear with proper scaling as you would zoom out camera in real life.
The other thing that I've just realised is possibility of drawing at small zoom level - that is on two or three screens and then zooming in - I suppose it should cut and recalculate it as a smaller part.
I would like to support devices at least from API 10 and not only high-end.
The question about time is the most crucial. I want everything to be as smooth as possible, so user wouldn't know that new canvas is being created each time.
I think it really depends on a number of things:
The complexity of this "infinite canvas": how "infinite" would it really be, what operations can be done on it, etc
The devices that you want to support
The amount of time/resource you wish to spend on it
If there are really not that many objects/commands to be drawn and you don't plan to support older/lower end phones, then you can get away with just draw everything. The gfx system would do the checking and only draws what would actually be shown, so you only waste some time to send commands pass JNI boundary to the gfx system and the associated rect check.
If you decided that you needs a more efficient method, you can store all the gfx objects' positions in 4 tree structures, so when you search the upper-left/upper-right/lower-left/lower-right "window" that the screen should show, it'll fast to find the gfx objects that intersects this window and then only draw those.
[Edit]
First of all thinking about infinity I was thinking about quite big
number of screens - at least 30 on zoom 1x in each side. I just need
to give my users bigger freedom in what they are doing.
If you just story the relative position of canvas objects, there's practically no limit on the size of your canvas, but may have to provide a button to take users to some point on canvas that they are familiar lest they got themselves lost.
When talking about scaling, there is another thing that has to be
concerned and connected with "infinity" of canvas. When user is
zooming out then screens, or more precise objects on the invisible
"neighbours" should appear with proper scaling as you would zoom out
camera in real life.
If you store canvas objects in a "virtual space", and using a "translation factor" to translate objects from virtual space to screen space then things like zoom-in/out would be quite trivial, something like
screenObj.left=obj.left*transFactor-offsetX;
screenObj.right=obj.right*transFactor-offsetX;
screenObj.top=obj.top*transFactor-offsetY;
screenObj.bottom=obj.bottom*transFactor-offsetY;
//draw screenObj
As an example here's a screenshot of my movie-booking app:
The lower window shows all the seats of a movie theater, and the upper window is a zoomed-in view of the same theater. They are implemented as two instances of the same SurfaceView class, besides user input handling, the only difference is that the upper one applies the above-mentioned "translation factor".
I assume that on all screens there will be maximum 500-800 rectangles
or circles.
It is actually not too bad. Reading your edit, I think a potentially bigger issue would be if an user adds a large number of objects to the same portion of your canvas. Then it wouldn't matter if you only draw the objects that are actually shown and nothing else - you'd still get bad FPS since the GPU's fill-rate is saturated.
So there are actually two potential sources of issues:
Too many draw commands (if drawing everything on canvas instead of just drawing visible ones)
Too many large objects in the same part of the screen (eats up GPU fill-rate)
The two issues requires very different strategy (1st one using tree structures to sort objects, 2nd one using dynamically generated Bitmap cache). Since how users use your app are likely to different than how you envisioned it to be, I would strongly recommend implementing the functions without the above optimizations, try to get as many people as possible to do testing, and then apply optimizations to each of the bottlenecks you encounter until the satisfactory performance is achieved.
[Edit 2]
Actually with just 500~800 objects, you can just calculate the position of all the objects, and then check to see if they are visible on screen, you don't even really need to use some fancy data structures like a tree with its own overheads.