I am working on a desktop application with JavaFX. As seen in the image below, I have an open space for a sort of mascot character, which I hope to give simple animations to. They are simple enough that it would be possible--but incredibly hard--to make in JavaFX, but complex enough that I feel like I should use a different method. This is my first JavaFX program, so my experience level is pretty low. I am able and willing to make these animations in other software and create a gif or mp4, etc if necessary, but I'm just in the dark here. I couldn't find much documentation. Below, you can see the space I would like to fill with an animated mascot. What method would be the best for this level of animation?
Related
I've been trying to figure out the best way to show an existing CALayer in a secondary window to allow real-time full-screen output on a secondary monitor. Additionally I would like to have the ability to show real-time thumbnails in my application of the original CALayer, it seems like I should be able to find a setup that could fulfill both requirements.
So far my research resulted in the following options:
CALayer.render(in: CGContext) Using the original layer and redrawing it to additional views this way and setting up a timer or a CVDisplayLink to redraw it every frame.
Rendering the CALayer to a NSBitmap every frame. And using that bitmap in NSImageView across the application.
Using a CAMetalLayer and rendering the texture multiple times using a MTKView. I'm not really familiar with Metal, this seems like a fairly elegant solution, but I'm not sure if it is required to go all the way down to Metal myself.
Using a CARemoteLayerServer with a CARemoteLayerServer.
This seems like an overly complicated setup for in-process sharing of a CALayer and it feels like this approach is more suitable if I'd need to share the layer cross-process.
Using CAReplicatorLayer. Instead of using the replicator layer to create a grid of copies I tried to use it to create just one copy, but it seems like you cant add a CALayer to multiple "parent layers".
All in all I've found some workable solutions, but as I'm quite a novice working with Core Animation I'm not sure which direction is the least resource-heavy and I might still be missing an easier solution.
Has anyone tried something similar?
I am new to coding and wanted to get some hands on practice with a project I have in mind. Here it is:
Let's say you have blank page and on the side of a screen you have several items you can choose to draw on the blank page. For example the background can be mountains, the ocean, a forest etc. On top of that you can place a house, a church or another selectable element. Whatever you like.
It is like a picture editor where you can put together a picture with different pre-given elements. Or like in video games where you can create your own character.
What would I need to build a web application for that kind of thing?
This link should get you started but it won't be the complete answer to your question - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/08/how-to-use-html5s-drag-and-drop/
Essentially, you can achieve your image dragging and dropping using similar techniques. It will require a bit of Spike work from yourself, and looking into how HTML5 can handle drag and drop. I discovered this resource fairly quickly and I think the solution you want isn't as complicated as you may think, it just requires a bit of know-how regarding drag and drop operations within HTML5 :-)
Also, there may already be some JavaScript based API's that do this sort of thing easier but I'm not too aware - I suppose starting this way could be a great introduction for you and you may wish to expand once you've done some work for it :-)
Hope this helps you and your coding journey!
I'm in the concept phase of a Mac application that should let the user easily select and layout images for printing. It's a document-based app and a document can have multiple pages with lots of pictures in different sizes and rotations on it. The UI would kind of be like the UI of Pages.app.
Those pictures can possibly be large hi-res images. The user should also be able to print them in the best quality that the images offer.
I have re-watched some WWDC sessions about Quartz, 2D drawing optimization and NSView.
I know that there are a few different ways of accomplishing what I want to do, namely:
Use a custom view for a "page" and draw the images in drawRect: with Core Graphics/Quartz. Use CG transforms to rotate and scale images.
Also use a custom view for a "page", but use NSImageView-subviews to display the images. Use Core Animation and layer transforms to scale/rotate images.
What is the best practice for this? Drawing with Core Graphics or using NSViews? Why?
Thank you so much!
Johannes
Depends on how interactive these pages should be. If there is a lot of mouse interaction, e.g. dragging, selecting etc. I'd go with views. If you want fluid animations I'd even use plain CALayers with their content set to one image. This would also let you zPosition the images in case they overlap. A view based solution makes z-ordering hard.
The drawRect method should be fastest but you have hard times integrating user interaction and you must z-order manually.
This is a reply I got from opening one of my two Apple Technical Support Incidents:
Hi Johannes,
Thanks for contacting Apple DTS regarding your question about printing
and the different ways to construct your applications general UI (with
views).
There is a trend toward using layer-backed views in OS X (utilizing
Core Animation layers) which is motivated by the ability to easily
animate your application's user interface, with little work, when
needed. However in terms of printing, you would be better off to
implement drawRect for custom views so that the view contents can be
drawn at "full resolution" when rendered into the context for
printing.
If instead you use layer backed views at as those layers to
"renderInContext" the layer contents would be used to render, which
commonly will not be set to the full resolution of your source
documents/images. This is because layer backed views take additional
memory to store those bitmaps (cached layer contents), and because of
that, they are recommended to be sized appropriately for the screen
(which may not necessarily be sized appropriately for the printed
page).
Does this help guide your application architecture? Please let me
know.
So basically this means that using layer-backed views might result in sub-optimal printing quality. I've replied with some follow-up questions ("How setting wantsLayer = NO on the rootView right before printing help?") and will post the answers as soon as I get them.
All three approaches should work. Since you should be using scaled-down representations of large images anyway, I don't think there will be much difference. Do what you feel most comfortable doing.
My guess is just using layer-backed NSViews (one par draggable image) will probably work best for starters. If you find performance lacking, you can always micro-optimize. Note that you may have to make your views a tad larger than the images so you can draw the selection handles outside them.
This is all assuming that you will never want to do a more complex drawing.
I tried to sign up, but I was unable; perhaps a problem from my side. Hopefully I'll get an answer as anonymous.
I apologize for the grammar/syntax, but English isn't my native language.
Recently I lost my job, so I have enough spare time to try something fun. I decided to create a simple text RPG game for me and some friends. It will very close to the board games like Talisman, Dungeon Run, and HeroQuest, using dice and a simple attribute/skill system. So no 3d graphics. The only 2d element, if I decide to include it, will be a map
that will allow the hero to move between locations. Currently I'm using Windows XP SP3, for the game I use wxDev-C++, and although cross platform would be cool, I don't really care.
I have some experience in C++ (currently using wxDev-C++), but I'm far from being called an expert or even a great programmer. I was about to start writing parts of the code, but I decided to check if creating a GUI for the game is possible. In some forums, many suggested I use Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets, but most examples I saw are grey boxes that are
indifferent at best, when I want something that fits better in a fantasy setting. I don't claim I would do better, but I want a GUI that is more fantasy related.
What I want from the GUI:
1. A "cool" Gui with decent graphics. I could even create an image to serve as a mask in Photoshop, but the GUI builder will have to support imported images.
2. A relatively large textbox in the middle (with a scrollbar) that will display die rolls, damage and options.
3. The ability to display dynamically values (like the change in the health after each action without requiring to refresh manually)
4. Display an icon or a small image of the character in the area where I display stats/abilities.
5. Open new windows created with tha same GUI builder to allocate points, buy/sell things and open a map.
About the map in the game: I decided to create a map in photoshop. When the hero decides to move to another location, a new window will open showing the map. I thought of 2 possible ways to move between locations: 1) Create hotspots on the image and select one by clicking on the name of the location.(I dare not think about the complexity of this so we
move to idea #2) and 2) Have the image as a backgroung to a grid with vertical and horizontal coordinates. When the hero selects a new area to visit, he clicks on the area, but what he really does is click on the grid, which returns the two values (x,y) of the location and informs the game about the area the hero wants to visit.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's too much, so what I'm most interested in are the 1-3. I know that even if they are possible, it will propably take forever, but as I said I have spare time, and I like learning new things. I apologize for the size of the post, but I decided to post as many info as possible so you know what I want.
If any of you has used Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets could you tell which covers most of my criteria? I saw some great stuff build with CEGUI, but I don't know if it is too hard to learn?
Thank in advance.
I know my answer comes pretty late, I only recently started using stackoverflow fairly recently, but maybe this response will help anybody.
CEGUI fully supports skinning widgets using XML. Our CEED editor (WYSIWYG) fully supports layout editing, but the skinning editor (LNF editor) is not finished as of now (11.11.2014), the development version supports exchanging images however and changing sizes and proportions, but more advanced adjustments have to be done in XML.
CEGUI has an imageset editor, fully supported by the CEED editor. Creating imagesets (sets of named subimages, with position and dimension inside a big texture atlas) is supported there. Additionally there is a way to create imagesets from just a bunch of jpg/png/... files using a tool. You would have to ask for specifics in the forum though because it is not integrated into CEED yet.
So basically with CEGUI you are free to make whatever fantasy GUI you want. Skinning simple elements like buttons and progress bars isn't much work in XML anyways. Without the finished editor, some more advanced widgets are more work to skin, but many skins have already been created done this way and some of them are even publically available in the forum and in the CEGUI stock files.
StaticText widgets supports what you want, you can even use images in there or change fonts and colours in the text if you want. Scrollbars are supported too.
I am not sure what you mean by this. You have to specify this.
A simple "Generic/Image" widget is available in CEGUI for this purpose. You can use precreated images or even RTT textures.
You can create and destroy windows in CEGUI without issues.
Regarding the map: I m not sure what you mean, but getting the position of a click in respect to an image (representing the map) is possible in CEGUI.
CEGUI is not particularly hard to learn. There is always the forums and the chat if you got questions. For an Open Source project it is quite well documented so if you read all of the API docu, and look at the supplied samples in the sample browser, you should already get quite far. And for everything additional there is the forum (search), the IRC chat and a community wiki (mind the targeted versions of an article there though)
For a project like yours, CEGUI seems perfectly suited (this is what it was created for in the first place). Qt is not really optimal for games for numerous reasons. wxWidgets I have never used.
I'm writing a video annotation application with Qt4 in which users need to be able to seek to various points in a video, putting markers on various objects and then setting keypoints for those markers so that they stay on the objects in the video as they move around. QGraphicsItemAnimation seems like a great place to start for these markers, however they need to be able to appear and disappear at specific times, which I can't figure out how to do with the QGraphicsItemAnimation. I could set the scale at 0 to make the objects disappear, but that seems like a pretty hacky solution, and I'm guessing that the paint engine would still waste cpu cycles trying to draw those invisible objects. Does anyone have a better solution than this? I'm using Qt 4.5.3 right now, but I'm willing to upgrade to 4.6 if it makes things easier. Thanks!!
It seems like the functionality you want of showing/hiding QGraphicsItem objects is beyond the scope of the simple "tweening" that the animation class performs. It is only for one object at a time, and any appearance or disappearance you have to write yourself.
You still might get some mileage out of QGraphicsItemAnimation (although the fact that it uses its own timer instead of being locked to the frame clock of your video is a little dodgy).
Neglecting "seeking" for a moment, there is a QTimeLine::finished() signal. If you let the end of an annotation's active animation timeline represent the point where you want it to disappear, you can trigger QGraphicsItem::hide() at that point. When it comes time to turn it back on, you would construct a new QGraphicsItemAnimation (based on the next run of keyframe data for that object) and call QGraphicsItem::show().
Note that one of the headlining features of Qt 4.6 is the QtAnimation framework, which is more sophisticated but also rather complex. I've not used it yet, but looking over the examples it seems like you might be able to "animate" a visibility or opacity property.