I'm developing chess game for Android (androidchess.appspot.com). If I want to add animations, should I use custom View extending Canvas (I do this now), or custom View extending SurfaceView?
I haven't tried using a View to extend Canvas, but for my game I'm using the same method as the LunarLander example game:
public class CustomView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback
The usefulness of this is that it gives you handles for SurfaceHolder (so you can call up the canvas which is drawn to the screen), and the callbacks for surfaceCreated, surfaceChanged and surfaceDestroyed. That lets you do things like drawing a custom animation as soon as the surface is available or make sure that you don't try to draw to the canvas after it has been deactivated. Looking through LunarLander should show you how to use these properly.
Edit: I remembered another reason why using a SurfaceHolder was useful. This is because, as I mentioned above, it lets you get direct access to the canvas which is drawn to the screen. With a SurfaceHolder this is done not by overriding onDraw but by using something like Canvas canvas = mSurfaceHolder.lockCanvas(). (See LunarLander for exact syntax). The reason this is important is because it lets you control exactly when the drawing happens. If you can only work by overriding onDraw(), then the drawing doesn't happen until your program reaches a 'waiting' phase. In other words, you can't use invalidate() and onDraw() in a loop because the drawing won't happen until the loop finishes. And since you're likely to use loops for things like drawing a piece moving across the screen, this becomes a problem.
Note: It may be possible to avoid this problem by using multiple threads. I simply haven't tried that since it isn't required for my game; the only animation is has is fixed-length animations in response to user input rather than something continuously moving in the background, so I haven't experimented with multiple threads yet.
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I'm building an android game and this is more of just best practices and performance question.
For the bitmaps that I have that the user interacts with, should I place them in an imageView and set an onTouchListener for each of them individually or should I just draw them onto the canvas and use the custom view's onTouch method to obtain the x and y of the touch and see if it falls in the range of any of the bitmaps to detect a touch.
My custom view takes up the entire screen, and I don't know how if it is even possible to draw an imageview onto the screen using a canvas which is why as of now I just use the onTouch method.
Thanks for any insight.
Depending on how dynamic your bitmaps render will be, you should go for either GLSurfaceView or SurfaceView, for something simple as just bitmaps i would recommend you to use SurfaceView as "renderer" where you can get the canvas from and of course you can draw on the whole screen if your surfaceview match the screen size.
TouchListener should be completely separated handled on its own listener promoting encapsulation and reuse of code for future apps that you want to do. I've found this quiet helpful for the last games i've developed asingning a surface view as renderer and just creating Objects which takes the canvas as parameter and drawing them self into it, the only thing you have to take on count is the bitmap resource management, but if you are careful of releasing and creating them when is proper, you should have no problems...
Regards!
I used surfaceview to create a graph. This graph changes continuously over time.
When I use postInvalidate method to update graph, surfaceview is redrawn but I don't want to redraw xy-axis. what should I do?
I believe what you are looking for is the lockCanvas(Rect dirty) method from the SurfaceHolder class.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/SurfaceHolder.html
Official documentation:
"Just like lockCanvas() but allows specification of a dirty rectangle. Every pixel within that rectangle must be written; however pixels outside the dirty rectangle will be preserved by the next call to lockCanvas()."
Therefore you can just change the graphs contents, leaving any pre-drawn axis
What is the best way to draw circles on a canvas that should have an alpha layer and change sizes? Should I use a View or a Surfaceview? The circles should also be clickable. And it should be smooth transitions when changing color size and position?
Should I put this in a runnable or use invlaidate in onDraw?
I would prefer that something like this also worked smoothly in low-end devices.
Any suggestions? I'm new to this kind of animations in Android.
If you are constantly drawing and taking user input at the same time, I would use a SurfaceView. However, if the only draw changes you plan on making to the circles happen when you touch them, then a simple View onDraw() override would probably do the trick. In the end it will just depend on what all is going on.
The point of the SurfaceView is to have that separate thread for drawing. If what you're doing could be in any way considered "game-like," then go for a SurfaceView; otherwise, stick with a View.
I say this because I'm currently working on a project with constant drawing using a View. The shapes that I'm drawing respond to touch and you can scroll through the View while it is still invalidating over and over. All this with a View and it still runs just fine on lower-end devices (I've only gone back to GingerBread, though).
Good luck!
I should also mention that in the project drawing in a View, almost everything has various alpha values and what not and runs fine.
I'm quite new to android and i want to make some animation (simple game later) like i did on windows (all programatically).
So I have questions what classes should be responsible for.
Activity
It's a base class for whole logic like updating variables (computing move etc.)
Should I create a new Thread on onCreate and run it onResume ? (I need continuous computing for moving objects)
View
Only for drawing animation
onDraw method for clearing Canvas (how to do this quickly? drawRect is efficent ? ) and drawing objects.
Should I invalidate that view or just call onDraw 30 times per second?
Regards
razor
Take a look at this http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/AccelerometerPlay/index.html
In Android 2.2, I want to display a few sprites and clickable animations over an existing view. I just discovered that SurfaceView cannot be transparent
I tried overriding dispatchDraw() of a LinearLayout but that doesn't seem to be callable via a Runnable Thread.
I also tried to extend Canvas directly, but that quickly turned into a mess when trying to place it in my XML layout.
Do I have to use GLSurfaceView to have a drawing view whose background is transparent?
Optimally, I'd like to just have a Canvas on which I can draw Bitmap at various coordinates, instead of dealing with the details of GL (unless GL is the only way I can do transparency).
Silly Rabbit. Just use Views and move them around wherever you want within a FrameLayout. SurfaceView is not designed for what you're trying to do.
I'm going to try Switching from Canvas to OpenGL and toss in parts of TranslucentGLSurfaceView.
I'm still open to selecting an answer that doesn't require OpenGL, just for the sake of it solving my original question.