What is the best approach to switch to different scenes/areas in a 3D game from the render area?
Say you have a character and he moves into a new area, how would you go about unloading the area and loading the new area. Would you just load the render function up with different loading calls and only load them if they fell within certain parameters or would you create enumerators for each area and use something like a switch statement to switch to the new area after unloading your data for the current area?
I have always created REALLY bad transitions on small games I have made for a hobby and it usually kills my performance at some point or time.
Using enum or/and switch/case is not very flexible.
You can simply use a function, example load_area(i), to unload a previous level/area then load level i instead (it could use a smart resource manager as suggested by
Andon M. Coleman).
You should separate the resource handling from the game logic and the engine. Example, the rendering system should display currently loaded drawable resources rather than looping through enums and select which scene to render.
You should minimize the unloading/loading phases; depending on the game, you can completely avoid discrete transitions by using an LOD-like (level of detail) manager that updates resources dynamically depending on the current state of the game.
Related
I'm making an isometric city builder using Monogame Extended and Tiled. I've got everything set-up and now i need to somehow access the specific tiles so i can change them at runtime as the user clicks on a tile to build an object. The problem is, i can't seem to find a "map.GetLayer("Layername").GetTile(x,y) or .SetTile(x,y) function or something similar.
Now what i can do is edit the xml(.tmx) file which has a matrix in it that represents the map and it's drawn tiles. The problem with this is that i need to build the map in the content pipeline again after editing for the changes to be displayed. I can't really build at runtime or can i?
Thanks in advance!
Something like this will get you part way there.
var tileLayer = map.GetLayer<TiledMapTileLayer>("layername");
TiledMapTile tile;
if(tileLayer.TryGetTile(x, y, out tile))
{
// do something with tile
}
However, there's only a limited amount of things you can actually do with the tile once you've got it from the map.
There's no such thing as a SetTile method because changing tile data at runtime is not currently supported. This is a limitation of the renderer, which has been optimized for rendering very large maps by building static geometry that can't be changed once it's loaded into the graphics card.
There has been some discussion about building another renderer that would handle dynamic map changes but at this stage nothing like that has been implemented in the library. You could always have a go at implementing a simple renderer yourself, a really basic one is not as hard as you might think.
An alternative approach to dealing with this kind of problem might be to pre-process the map data before giving it to the renderer. The idea would be to effectively separate the layers of the map that are static from those that are dynamic and render the dynamic tiles as normal sprites. Just a thought, I'm not sure about the details of how this might work.
I plan to eventually revisit the Tiled API in the next major version of MonoGame.Extended. Don't hold your breath, these things can take a lot of time, but I am paying attention to the feedback and kinds of problems people are experiencing with the existing API.
Since the map data is stored in a XML (or csv) file which runs through the Content Pipeline you can not change it at runtime.
Anyways, in a city builder you usually do not change existing tiles but you place object on top of existing tiles.
I'm analyzing my approach with Gmail's android developer's team approach in order to optimize drawing times and generally create more efficient apps.
My approach:
Below is the hierarchy inside a listview. It's quite straightforward. ExpandableListContentItem extends a Relative layout which has 3 Views:
Gmail app:
The following screenshot is how the listview in Gmail app works (SwipableListView). It's interesting to see that there is only one View (I guess aY extends ConvertationItemView) which in reality is quite more complicated than mine (I see 3 texts, 1 photo, 1 icon/button).
Question:
I would assume that this is a more lightweight approach to get rendered, is it so? Even if it takes me more time to code an optimal single customview per listview item it is worth the performance that it offers?
Finally the only way I know so far is to inflate an existing view inside another which is basically the first approach. I guess now my challenge would be to combine that relativeLayout with the 3 nested views into one. Is that correct?
PS:examples, open source code are welcome.
I would assume that this is a more lightweight approach to get rendered, is it so?
Yes it is. When you consider hierarchy, every parent measures their dimensions and passes it to child views from top to bottom. Reducing layers and having more flat view will save time.
Even if it takes me more time to code an optimal single customview per listview item it is worth the performance that it offers?
Depends on application you are developing. Depends on number of items in a list and how you get them. When you scroll through the list, if you think it is slow you might want to try that approach. I tried it on my previous applications and I could see the difference.
I guess now my challenge would be to combine that relativeLayout with the 3 nested views into one.
I don't know what you mean by combining them but the way Gmail does it that they have their Custom View. You can create your custom view.
Besides that, another thing to consider is overdraw. It is as important as having flat views. If you activate GPU Overdraw from developer tools and look at Gmail app row, you will see 0 overdraw. Make sure your code has no overdraw.
For further reading I would recommend you to check these blogs :
Performance Tuning On Android
Android Performance Case Study
I have an app which has quite a lot of activities, and all of the activities' layout have lots of views (TextViews, to display different kind of data in different styles, ImageViews etc).
When the activities load, they take too much time to load the layout/UI (more than a second).
Ques: Is there a way to reduce the time it takes to load the activity, because the activity takes too long to load the UI?
A short description of what I have:
All the layouts have at least 30-35 views
I am using Relative Layout
I am not nesting layouts, most of the views are parallel to each other, and the overdraw is at max 2x
All of the text views are custom, setting a custom font for them
The UI is being loaded in onCreate() of the activity
I am thinking of doing either of the following things:
Converting the app into Fragments in a way there are less number of activities, and more number of fragments. For example, there is one Home Activity which loads the first fragment, and further interactions with the app keep loading/switching between fragments for different purposes via Fragment Transactions. I would spawn a new activity only when I am hitting a limitation of Fragments.
Will it help improve the speed?
Disintegrate the UI in a way were the most basic UI is loaded in the view once the activity starts, and all the other UI elements are inflated in a background thread (AsyncTask) and are then added to the root of the current view.
In different opinions, which approach would be better?
Is there a better or standard way of solving this problem?
Appreciating all the inputs. Thanks in advance!
Here are some more suggestions to what you've already going to do.
If you inject views in onCreate() method, make sure you use design-time injection frameworks (Bufferknife or AndroidAnnotations) and not runtime ones (Guice, RoboGuice). Runtime frameworks definitely slow startup time down.
If you have views, which are not visible to the user initially, you can use ViewStub and load them on demand.
I'm making a silverlight website which includes paint-like features including freedraw. To achieve this I used the technique described on the following website: http://codeding.com/articles/freehand-drawing-in-silverlight .
The problem is, when I run the demo project it will start to lag extremely after just a few seconds of drawing. I realise that that is probably caused by the amount of shapes this techniue requires, however, and this is my main question:
How on earth does the demo on the website not lag nomatter howmuch I draw, while my local project which should have the EXACT same code lags right away?
I tried finding something about improving canvas performance overall, but the only thing I found was turning the drawing into a static image, which is not really ideal since I use undo/redo functionality.
The number of shapes added to the Canvas shouldn't be the reason for the lagging, there must be something else like converting the drawing into image for undo/redo functionality. For undo/redo, you can save the strokes-information instead of images. Creating & storing images during each undo/redo operation will consume too much memory.
A stroke is nothing but a set of points from the start (mousedown event) to end (mouseup event), and a set of strokes forms a complete drawing. You can always recreate the drawing using the saved strokes-information (just like you can recreate using images). You can use simple data-structures like List<List<Point>> to store a complete drawing, this is very memory efficient instead of creating & storing the image itself.
I'm developing my first Android game and I'm having a bit of difficulty making the UI as smooth as I would like. I've spent a couple of hours googling around with no luck, I'm probably just searching for the wrong thing.
I have two different XML layout resources where each layout contains just one SurfaceView subclass. When I call activity.setContentView(R.layout.second_layout) to transition from the first layout to the second layout there is a noticeable period of time where a black screen (with a small white bar along the top) is displayed in between the two views.
I've tried various things such as; constructing the second view manually at runtime (i.e not using a layout XML file), calling activity.overridePendingTransition(android.R.anim.fade_in, android.R.anim.fade_out) after activity.setContentView(R.layout.second_layout) and attempting to render to the canvas before the view has loaded (turns out the canvas is unavailable).
I don't see other games (or apps) having this issue so I presume there is a reasonably simple solution.
If you need some more information about my particular situation in order to help out then please let me know what information is missing. Any help would be largely appreciated.
Update: My answer below was written in 2010. Since then Fragments have become the norm, particularly since Fragment nesting was made possible and the support library allows this functionality to be used in a backwards compatible fashion. As such, instead of transitioning to a new Activity to perform a new "user task", you can use the one Activity and push and pop fragments within that Activity's view hierarchy. Animations can also be performed as a part of a fragment transaction (e.g. Fragment transaction animation: slide in and slide out).
This became pretty apparent not long after posting this question, however I thought I should come back here and make it clear to everyone else.
Activities are positively the way to go when developing for Android. Don't be put off by the fact that a transition may seem too minor for a separate Activity, the very foundation of Android is built around the idea of an Activity.