I've done a few little games here and there, same for GUI programs but I can't seem to make things re-sizable. Most GUIs handle re-sizing fairly well, but how is this achieved?
Lets say we have a 600x800 window, which has a 100x100 box in the very center, and another identical box 200x above it. If I stretched the window to 1280x720, what algorithm would ensure nothing slips out of place while moving and re-sizing the buttons to the new resolution?
I'd like this to apply to "pixel by pixel" displays, such as drawing a centered quad on the screen is where you tell at which pixel each vertex is, not something scalable such as OpenGL's default matrix.
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I want to make exact 1-pixel thick line without distortions. (means not appeared as 2-pixel lines or 1.5-pixel lines, etc) Because it seems like the Canvas just can't stand Pixel Perfect at times.
It is also depends on CanvasScaler setting, make sure that screen/canvas output is exactly at scale 1x.
Confirm that canvas final scale is all 1x
Also confirm that your displaying game window has 1x scale so that 1 pixel show up nicely too!
(View full unscaled image in another window if sprite in above image appear jagged)
For canvas scaler setting, if you use it in other mode such as "Scale with screen size", and its reference resolution did not match current game window, it will result in non 1x scaling.
If scale is non uniform, jagged or blurry line will start to appear on canvas.
Notice the middle sword sprite.
Canvas' pixel perfect tick box helped nothing so far.
Actually, sorry. Canvases try to respect screen pixels when scaling with PixelPerfect set to true.
The solution was pretty easy - just setting PixelPerfect to false. I got so used to set it to true (because of the UI style I was going for before) that I didn't even consider turning it off. I guess that's mainly due to its name - Pixel Perfect.
xD
I was making a circular icon with semi-transparency, so I started with a large filled-in circle with a black border, then I did white->alpha, and resized the image to my required size. Would it have made a difference if I resized first, and then did white->alpha?
Thanks.
Yes.
In general, whenever you are re-sampling, this will have an impact if you are using any anti-aliasing, or the resampling algorithm is something other than nearest-neighbor.
Try the following exercise for a visual example:
In both cases, create your circular icon.
Case 1:
Change white-center of the circle to alpha (0%, fully transparent).
Re-sample (ie: down-sample to 25%) the entire image using something other than nearest neighbour (ie: actually use antialiasing of some sort)
Paste a copy of the result over a red background.
You should only see black and red colors inside the circle when you zoom in, with a smooth transition from black-to-red.
Case 2:
Re-sample (ie: down-sample to 25%) the entire image using something other than nearest neighbour (ie: actually use antialiasing of some sort)
Change white-center of the circle to alpha (0%, fully transparent).
Paste a copy of the result over a red background.
You should see a black outer circle, with a bit of a white halo inside of it, then the red center, with a smooth black-to-white transition, and a sharp white-to-red transition. This will depend on the aggressiveness factor you set with the magic-wand tool you are likely using to auto-select the region you want to modify the alpha properties of.
Now repeat case 2, but disable any sort of anti-aliasing, and enforce the use of a nearest neighbour algorithm rather than bi-cubic spline, Hermite, Gaussian, etc. Your results will look very similar to case 1, except you won't see the smooth transition from black-to-red when you zoom in, you will just see a sharp black-to-red transition.
In general, you will get the best subjective quality when working on your images first, then re-sampling later. If you paste it as its own layer, then you still have all the image data available any none is lost, the image is just rendered smaller.
I am a complete novice when coming to using Flash but I am looking to create an animation similar to the line into text animation at:
http://www.louisebradley.co.uk/fl/
where instead of running from the top of the screen I want the line to effectively stretch across my homepage horizontally.
I have created an animated gif that does the job but it takes a long time to stretch across 974 pixels in width, and if the frames are reduced it takes away any smoothing effect. I did this in photoshop by simply creating 20 or so frames, each increasing the size of the line by 60 pixels until the full page is covered.
Would I be better off creating the effect in Flash? And if so, where on earth do I start!! Would tweening do this, and how I would I implement it?
Thanks in advance for any help!
I am assuming you are talking about the line to the left of the main navigation? If this is the case, this is being done using a mask that is tweened. You can simply draw out the shape you want "wiped" across the screen and than on the layer above it, draw a box over the shape to be animated. Right click the layer the box is on and select "mask". You can now tween the mask to move from right to left over the shape you drew and it will appear to wipe over. Just remember, whatever the mask is currently over, is what will show through from the layer that is masked. Think of the mask as a window. This can be completely done without actionscript and only using the timeline.
I couldn't post the image, but I use the "CGContextDrawRadialGradient" method to draw a shaded blue ball (~40 pixel diameter), it's shadow and to make a "pulsing" white ring around the ball (inner and outer gradients on the ring). The ring starts at the edges of the blue ball and expands outward (radius grows with a timer). The white ring fades as it expands outward like a radio wave.
Looks great running in the simulator but runs incredibly slow on the iPhone 4. The ring should pulse in about a second (as in simulator), but takes 15-20 seconds on the phone. I have been reading a little about CALayer, CGLayer and reading some segments on a some gradient animation, but it isn't clear what I should be using for best performance.
How do I speed this up. Should I put the ball on a layer and the expanding ring on another layer? If so, how do I know which layer to update on a drawrect?
Appreciate any guidance. Thanks.
The only way to speed something like that up is to pre-render it. Determine how many image frames you need to make it look good and then draw each frame into a context you created with CGBitmapContextCreate and capture the image using CGBitmapContextCreateImage. Probably the easiest way to animate the images would be to set the animationImages property of a UIImageView (although there are other options, like CALayer animations).
The newest Apple docs finally mention which pixel formats are supported in iOS so make sure to reference those when creating your bitmap context.
I have a bunch of game elements being drawn to the screen with OpenGL-ES and I'd like to be able to render a small rectangle in the bottom corner of the screen that shows, say, what's presently being displayed in the top left quarter of the screen.
In that way it's similar to a picture-in-picture from a tv, only the smaller picture would be showing part of the same thing the bigger picture is showing.
I'm comfortable with scaling in OpenGL-ES, but what I don't know how to do is get the proper rectangle of renderbuffer data and use that chunk as the data for an inset frame buffer for the next render pass. I imagine there's some trick along these lines to do this efficiently.
I've tried re-rendering the game elements at a smaller scale for this inset window and it just seems horribly inefficient when the data is already elsewhere and just needs to be scaled down a bit.
I'm not sure I'm asking this clearly or in the right terms, So any and all illumination is welcome and appreciated - especially examples. Thank you!
Have a look at glCopyTexImage2D. It lets you copy a portion of the framebuffer into a texture. So the order of operation would be:
Draw your scene normally
Bind your picture-in-picture texture
glCopyTexImage2D
Draw a quad with that texture in the bottom corner