Keeping track of an object and painting behind - actionscript

I have been struggling with this problem for a time and being unable to solve it led me here. I'm recently new to Actionscript (2.0). I want to do something similar to:
http://gnarshmallow.com/
Were i want something to be painted behind a moving object in real time.
I would like some advice on how to approach the problem.

You need to use line drawing to do this. You will need two points, and it will draw a line from one to the next. I recommend having it run on every movement call. Have it draw the line between the racer's location in the previous frame, and his location in the current frame. For further reference, check out this page.
http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/730/1/Drawing-lines-with-AS2/Page1.html

Related

Animating line graph with circular points

I have stumbled upon an interesting problem and I am not sure how to solve it. I have a line graph on which data points are marked with circular dots. At the moment I am creating one CAShapeLayer for the line itself and also CAShapeLayer for each dot.
The line is being animated with the strokeEnd animation key path. And it is working. However, the slightly negative effect is that once I open the graph I see all the data points already drawn and then a line is being animated through them.
Ideally I would like to change this behaviour in such a way that at the beginning nothing is shown and as the line gets animated data points are being drawn once the line passes through them.
I was thinking about this problem for some time now and I cannot find an elegant way of solving it. It seems to me that there should be a fairly easy way of achieving what I want. Maybe I should create a compounded path (but then how do I specify that a line needs to be stroked whereas dots need to be filled?).
Could anyone please guide me in the right direction?
There are lots of ways to handle this.
Assuming that the X increments of your graph are constant, and you're using linear timing, you could simply divide the total animation time by the number of data-points, and calculate the times when you need to add points to the graph when the line progresses to that X position. Simply add dot shape layers to the parent view's layer at the appropriate time intervals.
You could also change your drawing method to add new line segments to your graph path one at a time, on a timer, and add dot shapes at the same time. That would give you a step-by-step animation rather than a smooth line drawing.

I cannot get the note timing right - XNA

In XNA I've created a note sequence, and I'm trying to get the item to be drawn to the screen at a certain time? my check for this is a simple int that gets updated as the gametime does Convert.ToInt64(time)
is the code for that. However the only problem I got was it seemed that it kept drawing it which made the note lag? Could somebody please help?
Create a global variable that check if you draw it or not.
Once you draw it make it true.
In the update, do:
if(!variable&&time>"yourtime")
...

Menu from the Contre Jour app

I'm trying to do a menu like the one that "Contre Jour" game has, with 3 elements spinning in a circle when user drags left and right. I'm using CALayers with CATransforms to position them in a 3d spinning wheel (no problem so far).
I need a way (maybe with NSTimers?) to calculate in-between values, because CoreAnimation just interpolates values, but if you NSLog them, it's just gonna show the start and the end, or just the end. I need all the in-between values, I need to snap the wheel movement when I release the finger (touches ends)in one position (there are 3 elements, each one shoud be at 120 degrees.
My guess and am quite sure I'm correct is that they are using a game engine such as Unity3D or Cocos2D or any other of the many to manage their sprites, animations, textures, physics and basically everything. Trying to replicate it outside of game engine will most likely result in crummy performance and a lot of hair pulling. I would suggest looking into a dedicated game engine and give it a shot there.
I am not sure I understand exactly what Contre Jour does with the spinners, anyway, I think that a reasonable approach for your case is using a UIPanGestureRecognizers to update the status of your spinning wheels according to the panning.
Now, it is not clear what you do to animate the spinning wheel (if you could provide some code, this would help understanding exactly what you are trying to do), but the idea would be this: instead of specifying an animation ending point far away from the starting point (and letting Core Animation do all the handling for you, even when the dragging has stopped), you would only modify the status of the spinning wheel in small increments.
If your only issue is stopping the animation when the dragging stops, you could try calling removeAnimationForKey on your layer to halt a specific animation.
Look into CADisplayLink. This works very much like an NSTimer, except its refresh rate is tied to that of the display, so your animations will be smoother than if you were to use timers. This will allow you to calculate all the in-between values and update your control.
I'm not clear what you are asking, but I do have one insight for you: To get the in-between values of an in-flight animation, query the layer's presentationLayer property. the property that's being animated will have a value that's a close approximation of it's on-screen appearance at the moment you fetch the value.

Drawing lines in cocos2d

I'm trying to draw lines in Cocos2d using touches.
I had a system where it would just add a small sprite where you touched, but it's working terribly. So I've been trying to find a way to draw actual lines using a method like ccDrawLine, but every tutorial I find seems to leave out something, and I just can't figure it out.
I've found this tutorial, Drawing line on touches moved in COCOS2D but I don't understand a few things about that.
It seems to reference the same variable from two different files, so I don't understand how it's doing that. (The naughtyTouchArray variable)
I can't find a complete guide on drawing lines, so sorry for the codeless question, but I'm getting frustrated.
Thanks.
The answer you've linked in your question provides good solution to your problem. There is no "two different files". Just two different methods of one layer. One method (ccTouchesMoved:withEvent:) handles touches and fill the array of points to be connected to each other one-by-one with lines. From cocos2d documentation, all drawing must be placed in the draw method of the node. So, another (draw) method just draws lines according to the given array. Cocos2d is based on OpenGL and it fully redraws scene every tick, so you cannot just draw new line. You had to draw all of them.
Or any other node can draw your array in it's draw method, so you can simply pass stored array of points from the layer, that detects touches, to this node.

Making a Drawable layer in cocos2d

I want to make sort of a chalk board for part of my app, and I was wondering how to accomplish this?
I was thinking I could create a sprite and have it's image set to something very small (maybe a small point), and then add a new instance of that sprite everywhere the user touches to simulate a draw event. Something like [self addChild:someSprite]; for each touch location.
But it seems like that would be extremely memory inefficient. There has to be a better way than that, Maybe drawing actual lines? I'm probably overlooking some method.
Thanks for any help.
You need to use CCRenderTexture for chalk board paintings. Check this article & project for a drawing example.
Your variant isn't such "memory inefficient" as you think. No matter how much sprites will you create with the same texture, your texture will be placed to the memory only once. And all the sprites will use pointer to it. Just one thing to prevent many unnessesary calls is to use CCBatchNode. It will draw all it's children with single draw call. Without using it, draw will be called on every children.

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