I have several building models that I am loading into a scene that I am going to clone into a town. I want to clone the buildings individually so I can mix them up so it isn't the same 4 buildings next to each other over and over.
If I were doing a 2D app I would probably put a bunch of the assets into a single file as a sprite sheet. Is this the approach to use in Babylonjs with glb files or is it better to do a single asset per file? Looking at the API it seems more suited to one asset per file but I am still very new to it so I may be missing something.
I am also not attached to using glb if there is a better approach.
Related
I am building my flash card iOS app for reviewing my learning Japanese using SwiftUI language.
The problem is how to storing and updating my images(>500 images). Please help me, any suggestion is appreciated, thanks for reading my post.
I think you're asking about how to manage 500+ images in an Xcode project. You could just add all the images to your project and load them as you would any image. You could use asset catalogs, which have the advantage that they let you store different versions of a resource for use on different devices, and only the ones needed for the device the app runs on will actually be installed on the device. See How Many Images Can/Should you Store in xcassets in Xcode? and Asset Catalog Format Reference for more information about asset catalogs. But any way you slice it, managing 500+ images is going to be cumbersome. There's probably a better way...
Managing all those images in your app isn't just a problem for you as the developer; building them into the app will also create problems for the user. Even if each image is relatively small, having hundreds of them in the app will probably make the app huge. That means it'll take a long time to install, and the app will use a lot of storage on the device. Every time you release a new version of the app, with more words, or even just to fix a few small bugs, the user will have to download all that data all over again.
Instead, you should consider building an app that can fetch the data it needs from a server. Ideally, you could apply that approach to all your app's data, not just the images. Maybe you'll organize your flash cards into sets of a few dozen, so that you can fetch a set of cards and the associated images pretty quickly, and sets that the user hasn't used for a while can be removed to free up space on the device. You'll be able to update a set of flash cards without having to update the app, and when you do update the app your users won't have to download all the data all over again.
You've said that you're a beginner, so this approach might seems very difficult. That's OK, you can start with a simpler approach and then improve as you go along. For example, you might just put all the images on a server and fetch them one at a time as you need them. Your flash card data file could contain just a dictionary with words and the URLs associated with those words. There are lots of examples of loading an image from an URL here on SO and elsewhere, so I'm not going to provide code for that, but it won't be hard to find. The earlier you start thinking about how to design your app so that it can scale as you add more and more words, the easier it will be to maintain the app later.
500 images can have a huge size. Applications that published on Appstore have size limit and Apple does not recommend to make big apps.
Store them on server and load needed images on fly. Also you will get possibility to update your images, remove add new.
If you don't have a backend, you can use something easy and free (Firebase storage for example) or with minimal code writing on AWS.
If you need to keep them on device - store them as files in the Documents or another apps folder, do not use CoreData for it (you can keep only the list of names/urls in database).
After loading image to be displayed for user, you can prefetch next bunch of images.
Use Alamofire, or SDWebImage to load images from network (I prefer last). These frameworks can do many useful things with images.
To load images:
you can have a list of your images (just list of the names and urls)
or
you can know only path and names pattern and generate links dynamically (like https://myserver/imageXXX.png.
I'm looking into using UIDocument en NSFileWrapper to store 'projects' that contain quite a few large video files and some small text files. There are a few problems that I run into, and I'm starting to wonder if UIDocument is still the right strategy.
Performance
As far as I can tell, NSFileWrapper loads everything in memory. This can be a problem when working with large video files. I think it's possible to work around this by using custom save and load methods that forego the standard NSFileWrapper.
Metadata
I want to display a list of all the documents along with some metadata. This can for example include a preview image, number of recorded scenes, length of videos etc. The only way to fetch this data now is to open each document and retrieve it. Probably quite slow, especially with large documents.
Solutions?
I see two solutions now: ditch UIDocument altogether and go for a custom architecture, or use some kind of centralized metadata file. Drawbacks of the latter is that I have to manage metadata in two separate places and that I need to keep them in sync manually.
Is UIDocument still the way to go here, and if so: What could be a way to solve these problems?
Based on the comments the asker found a way to move forward as such:
drop UIDocument in favor of a Core Data solution. I now save all my
data using Core Data and manually manage the large files on the
filesystem. It works pretty well for me, and I'm glad I made the
switch. The only thing I had to give up was easy iCloud syncing. But
with files as large as these, that wasn't really feasible anyway. It
seems you can create your own file wrapper class to work around some
performance problems with large files.
I am interested in building a Rails based system for handling the display and organization of large amounts of photos. This is sort of like Flickr but smaller. Each photo will have metadata associated with it. Photos will be shown in a selectable list and grid view. It would be nice to be able to load images as they are needed as well (as this would probably speed things up).
At the moment I have a test version of my database working by images loading from the assets/images directory but it is beginning to run slow when displaying several images (200-600 images). This is due to the way I have my view setup. I am using a straight loop to display the images in both list and grid layouts.
I also manually resized the thumbnails and a medium sized image from a full sized source image. I am investigating other resizing methods. Any advice is appreciated here as well.
As I am new to handling the images this way, could someone point me in a direction based on experience designing and implementing something like Flickr?
I am investigating the following tools:
Paperclip
http://railscasts.com/episodes/134-paperclip
Requirements: ImageMajick
attachment_fu
http://clarkware.com/blog/2007/02/24/file-upload-fu#FileUploadFu
Requirement: One of the following: ImageScience, RMagick, miniMagick, ImageMajick?
CarrierWave
http://cloudinary.com/blog/ruby_on_rails_image_uploads_with_carrierwave_and_cloudinary
http://cloudinary.com/blog/advanced_image_transformations_in_the_cloud_with_carrierwave_cloudinary
I'd go with Carrierwave anyday. It is very flexible and has lot of useful strategies. It generates it's on Uploader class and has all nifty and self explanatory features such as automatic generation of thumbnails (as specified by you), blacklisting, formatting image, size constraints etc; which you can put to your use.
This Railscast by Ryan Bates - http://railscasts.com/episodes/253-carrierwave-file-uploads is very useful, if you haven't seen it already.
Paperclip and CarrierWave are totally appropriate tools for the job, and the one you choose is going to be a matter of personal preference. They both have tons of users and active, ongoing development. The difference is whether you'd prefer to define your file upload rules in a separate class (CarrierWave), or if you'd rather define them inline in your model (Paperclip).
I prefer CarrierWave, but based on usage it's clear plenty of people feel otherwise.
Note that neither gem is going to do anything for your slow view with 200-600 images. These gems are just for handling image uploads, and don't help you with anything beyond that.
Note also that Rails is really pretty bad at handling file uploads and file downloads, and you should avoid this where possible by letting other services (a cdn, your web server, s3, etc) handle these for you. The central gotcha is that if you handle a file transfer with rails, your entire web application process is busy for the duration of the transfer. (For related discussion on this topic, see: Best Ruby on Rails Architecture for Image Heavy App).
I'm trying to be lazy and would rather find an existing gem, plugin, etc. instead of writing my own implementation. The use case seems to me general enough that there may be something out there, but I can't find anything.
We're using Ruby on Rails and carrierwave to have users upload images that attach to so-called activities (which need to be curated several times a day). It turns out that users often (re-)use the same images for different activities. Instead of making the users upload the same image again all the time, I want to present them with a small gallery of images, and let them pick one to be used (or let them upload if they really want to, of course).
Is there something out there that would help me ?
I'm currently learning rails by creating a simple project management app. I've gotten to the point where I would like to be allow a user upload multiple files - pdfs, docs, xls etc. The user only needs to be able to attach one file at a time, but the possibilty to have multiple documents associated with a project is a must.
I've spent quite a lot of time researching my options, and it appears the two main plugins are attachment_fu and paperclip. From what I've read though, these appear to concentrate specifically on the upload and subsequent resizing of images, something I couldn't care less about. Is there a simpler way to achieve what I'm trying?
Thank you all in advance.
You might still consider using attachment_fu or paperclip as those are the "standard" libraries for such tasks. And they work fine for any kind of file.
The multi-upload can't be made without JS or Flash now. You need add some hack in your view to manage it.