Can I do this?
My question arises from the need of a button that I'm animating when a user touches it.
This animation has been made with a set of 30 png images (half a second of animation # 60FPS). This totals 60 images for regular and retina screens. It works quite well this way, but I'm not happy about it.
My goals are:
1 - Drastically reduce the size of my app (e.g my background is a 400KB png file, but with quartz I can do it with a dozen lines of code).
2 - Do with it with a perfect, smooth animation, as light on the CPU/GPU as I can.
So, is there anyway I can do this?
I have the images in pure vector, and I can draw them with Quartz. But not animate it without having to redraw everything for every frame. (Well, the animation is a "2 way street", it's the coming back that would be problematic to redraw)
Are there any APIs/Frameworks that would help me do this? How would I go about it?
Thank you!
Take a look at CAShapeLayer. It's path property is animatable. For an animation to look good it's important that the from & to shape in the animation have the same amount of points. So depending on your shapes this might or might not work.
Related
I am making a 2d platformer and I decided to use multiple tilemapnodes as my backgrounds. Even with 1 tile map, I get these vertical or horizontal lines that appear and disappear when I'm moving the player around the screen. See image below:
My tiles are 256x256 and I'm storing them in a tileset sks file. Not exactly sure why I'm getting this or how to get rid of this and it is quite annoying. Wondering if others experience this as well.
Considering to not use the tile maps, but I would prefer to use them if I can.
Thanks for any help with this!!!
I had the same issue and was able to solve it by "extruding" the tiled image a couple pixels. This provides a little cushion of pixels to use when the floating point issue occurs instead of displaying nothing (hence the gap). This video sums it up pretty well.
Unity: extruding tile map images
If you're using TexturePacker to generate your sprite atlas' there is an option to add this automatically without having to do it to your tile images yourself.
Hope that helps!
Sort of like the "extruding" suggested by #cheaze, I simply make the tile size in the drawing code a tiny amount larger than the required tile size. This means the assets themselves do not have to be changed.
Eg. if you assets are sized 256 x 256 and all of your calculations are based on that; draw the textures as 256.02 x 256.02 pixels in size:
[SKSpriteNode spriteNodeWithTexture:texture size:CGSizeMake(256.02, 256.02)];
Only adding .02 pixel per side will overlap your tiles automatically and remove the line glitches, depending on your camera speed and frame rate.
If the problem is really bad, you can even go so far as to add half a pixel (+0.5) or an entire pixel to remove the glitches, yet the user will not be able to see the difference. (Since a one pixel difference on a retina screen is hard to distinguish).
Blending and offscreen-rendering are both expensive in Core Animation.
One can see them in Core Animation instrument in Instruments, with Debug Options:
Here is my case:
Display 50x50 PNG images on UIImageViews. I want to round the images with a 6-point corer radius. The first method is to set UIImageView.layer's cornerRadius and masksToBounds which causes offscreen-rendering. The second method is to make PNG image copies with transparent corners which causes blending(because of the alpha channel).
I've tried both, but I can't see significant performance difference. However, I still want to know which is worse in theory and best practices if any.
Thanks a lot!
Well, short answer, the blending has to occur either way to correctly display the transparent corner pixels. However, this should typically only be an issue if you want the resulting view to also animate in some way (and remember, scrolling is the most common type of animation). Also, I'm able to recreate situations where "cornerRadius" will cause rendering errors on older devices (iPhone 3G in my case) when my views become complex. For situations where you do need performant animations, here are the recommendations I follow.
First, if you only need the resources with a single curve for the rounded corners (different scales are fine, as long as the desired curvature is the same), save them that way to avoid the extra calculation of "cornerRadius" at runtime.
Second, don't use transparency anywhere you don't need it (e.g. when the background is actually a solid color), and always specify the correct value for the "opaque" property to help the system more efficiently calculate the drawing.
Third, find ways to minimize the size of transparent views. For example, for a large border view with transparent elements (e.g. rounded corners), consider splitting the view into 3 (top, middle, bottom) or 7 (4 corners, top middle, middle, bottom middle) parts, keeping the transparent portions as small as possible and marking the rectangular portions as opaque, with solid backgrounds.
Fourth, in situations where you're drawing lots of text in scrollViews (e.g. highly customized UITableViewCell), consider using the "drawRect:" method to render these portions more efficiently. Continue using subviews for image elements, in order to split the render time between the overall view between pre-drawing (subviews) and "just-in-time" drawing (drawRect:). Obviously, experimentation (frames per second while scrolling) could show that violating this "rule-of-thumb" may be optimal for your particular views.
Finally, making sure you have plenty of time to experiment using the profiling tools (especially CoreAnimation) is key. I find that it's easiest to see improvements using the slowest device you want to target, and the results look great on newer devices.
After watching WWDC videos and having some experiments with Xcode and Instruments I can say that blending is better then offscreen rendering. Blending means that system requires some additional time to calculate color of pixels on transparent layers. The more transparent layers you have (and bigger size of these layers) then blending takes more time.
Offscreen rendering means that system will make more then one rendering iteration. At first iteration system will make rendering without visualization just to calculate bounds and shape of area which should be rendered. In next iterations system does regular rendering (depends on calculated shape) including blending if required.
Also for offscreen rendering system creates a separate graphics context and destroys it after rendering.
So you should avoid offscreen rendering and it's better to replace it with blending.
To best illustrate the issue I'm having, I created a short screen grab. Watch it here: http://cl.ly/1o3p3x2e2J1a1d3d2N1Q
Basically, the stars on the screen, as they're animated across the screen from right to left, are dimming and brightening on their own. I'm not intending on this happening. When you zoom in, the issue disappears.
My hunch is that this has to do with the size of the objects being drawn and the pixel boundaries. Is this correct? What is the best way to go about fixing this issue?
Thanks!
---Edit---
Here's how I'm loading the texture: http://pastebin.com/RDc8x7Te
And, here's how I'm setting up OpenGL ES: http://pastebin.com/SpvAqPqA
You use nearest and linear for scaling textures, which are both not very accurate. You might want to use linear for both, or build mipmaps. Also in case you use an orthogonal view, try aligning your geometry on pixels.
Programming for iOS, I have a composite custom view consisting of many UIViews. Some UIViews in this composites are responsible for drawing shadow and others for some custom shading. The shadow and shading need to be redrawn upon rotation recognized by UIRotationGestureRecognizer. However the speed of the rotation is far from satisfactory. When I commented out setNeedDisplay, the rotational speed is fine. However, if I do call setNeedDisplay, even when I commented out everything in all drawRects for the shadow and shading views, the rotation still lags significantly.
Are there any recommendations to speed things up?
I can think of one possible solution: make sure the system calls drawRect less often while in rotation. But I do not know how to do this, nor do I know if this is the best solution. Any suggestion appreciated. Thanks.
Calling setNeedsDisplay: too often, especially every frame will always be slow. setNeedsDisplay runs on the CPU, not the GPU. Don't redraw views during rotation and zooming. Wait until the end of the animation, then call setNeedsDisplay: to "render" the final position.
Take a look at how various UIKit views handle large animations:
While MapKit zooms in, the map image scales and looks blurry. Once the zoom gesture stops it renders a new image at that scale. (In this case the image is downloaded from the internet, but it still illustrates the concept.)
ZoomingPDF Sample code (see apple developer docs) shows how zooming on PDFs doesn't render in realtime, but after the zooming finishes.
Hope this helps.
Im starting with XNA and i need an advice about the following.
I have a .jpg file with my space ship game background with the following size:
width: 5000px
height: 4800px
When i try to load the texture i get the following error:
Texture width or height is larger than the device supports
What is the most used technique to move the background at the same time that your ship is moving?
Thanks a lot.
Kind Regards.
Josema.
One way would be to separate your image into smaller tiles and draw the visible ones.
However this technique suffers from a problem when bilinear sampling is used, because the colors bleeds from the one side of the texture to the other. You can probably compensate by disabling texture WRAP sampling or by grabbing a single of pixels from the tiles next to.
For example if you want 256x256 textures, you would only display 255x255 tiles, because one line (right and bottom) is a copy from the tiles next to it.
Hope it makes sense, otherwise I'll have to paint a picture :-)
The texture limit is determined by graphics card, I believe.
You want to break the texture down to smaller images.
Try something like this. He's tiling a simple 40x40, but you might use it a a guideline on how to tile yours.
http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/19835/103704.aspx
To move the background at the same time that your ship is moving you can implement a camera.
The following links might help-
http://adambruenderman.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/create-a-2d-camera-in-xna-gs-4-0/
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/237979-2d-camera-in-xna/