I need to add about 50 sprites to the screen then redraw them. When I try and add them like this:
[self addChild:Img];
This creates a lot of lag.
I have also tried creating a CCLayer then adding the all of the images to the layer but i get the same amount of lag. How can I add all of these sprites and decrease on lag? Most games probably have more then 50 sprites a page.
If all or most of your sprites are the same, then you could use one CCSpriteBatchNode for all CCSprites sharing the same texture or image. This will save memory.
You would do something like the following,
1)define a CCSpriteBatchNode
2)add it as a subview.
3)define a frame from the batchNode
4)set it as displayFrame for the sprite
Use the CCSpriteSheet, If you haven’t used sprite sheets yet, think of them as gigantic images that you put your sprites within. They come with a file that specifies the boundaries for each individual sprite so you can pull them out when you need them within the code.
The reason why these are such a good idea to use is because Cocos2D is optimized for them. If you use sprites within a sprite sheet properly, rather than making one OpenGL ES draw call per sprite it just makes one per sprite sheet.
In short – it’s faster, especially when you have a lot of sprites!
Related
I'm using Unity 4.6 to develop a 2D game. I want to know if having a lot of GameObjects in the scene (out of the camera's sight) has a considerable influence on performance.
For example, is it efficient to make an scrollable list of names (like 1000 of them)? (each one is a GameObject and has a text, a button etc.)
I mask them in a specified area (for example 10 of them are visible at the same time).
Thanks in advance!
Depends on whether or not the objects have visible components. If they do, the engine will draw them even if they are 'off-camera'. A game object by itself has a pretty light load - a tile based game could have thousands in memory. You'll want to toggle the visibility of sprites if you plan on drawing a large number to the scene off-camera. This is where a SpriteManager comes in. It'll check to see if the sprite is in the camera's rectangle and disabled sprites that aren't. There is a semi-offical exmaple here that is good if a little complicated:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=SpriteManager
I am working on a simple painting app using LibGDX, and I am having trouble getting it to "paint" properly with the setup I am using. The way I am trying to do this is to draw with sprites, and add these individual sprites into a background texture, using LibGDX's FBO commands, when it is appropriate.
The problem I am having is something relating to blending, in that when the sprites are added to this texture that I am building, any transparent pixels of the sprite that are on top of pixels that have been drawn to previous will be brightened up substantially, which obviously doesn't look very good. The following is what the result looks like, using a circle with a green>red gradient as the "brush". The top row is part of the background texture now, while the bottom one is still in its purely sprite drawn form.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff307/Muriako/hmm.png
Basically, the transparent areas of each sprite are brightening anything below them, and I need to make them completely transparent. I have messed around with many different blending mode combinations and couldn't find one that was any better. GL_SRC_ALPHA,GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA for example did not have this problem, but instead the transparent pixels of each sprite seem to be lowered in alpha and even take on some of the color from the layer below, which seemed even more annoying.
I will be happy to post any code snippets on request, but my code has become a bit of mess since I started trying to fix these problems, so I would rather only put up the necessary bits as necessary.
What order are you drawing the sprites in? Alpha blending only works with respect to pixels already in the target, so you have to draw all alpha-containing things (and everything "behind" them) in Z order to get the right result. I'm using .glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
I am using LibGDX for a small app project, and I need to somehow take a series of sprites and place them (or their pixels rather) into a Pixmap. The basic idea is to take random sprites that are generated through various means while the app is running, and, only at specific times, merge some of them onto a single background sprite.
I believe that most of this can be done easily, but the step of getting the sprite images into the Pixmap isn't quite so obvious to me. The sprites also have various transparent and semi-transparent pixels, so simply grabbing the color at each pixel while it is all on the same screen isn't really applicable either, as it obviously shouldn't take the background colors with it.
If there is a suitable alternative to this that would accomplish what I am looking for I would also love to hear it. Any help is highly appreciated.
I think you want to render your sprites to an off-screen buffer (called an "FBO" or FrameBuffer in libgdx) (blending them as they're added), and then render that offscreen buffer to the screen as a single draw call? If so, this question should help: libgdx SpriteBatch render to texture
This requires OpenGL ES 2.0, which will eliminate support for some older devices.
I come from a 2D animation background and so when ever I us an animated sequence I prefer to use a sequence of images. To me this makes a lot of sense because you can easily export the image sequence from your compositing/editing software and easily define the aspect.
I am new to game development and am curious about the use of a sprite sheet. What are the advantages and disadvantages. Is file size an issue? - to me it would seem that a bunch of small images would be the same as one massive one. Also, defining each individual area of the sprites seems time cumbersome.
Basically, I dont get why you would use a sprite sheet - please enlighten me.
Thanks
Performance is better for sprite sheets because you have all your data contained in a single texture. Lets say you have 1000 sprites playing the same animation from a sprite sheet. The process for drawing would go something like.
Set the sprite sheet texture.
Adjust UV's to show single frame of animation.
Draw sprite 0
Adjust UV's
Draw sprite 1
.
.
.
Adjust UV's
Draw sprite 998
Adjust UV's
Draw sprite 999
Using a texture sequence could result in a worst case of:
Set the animation texture.
Draw sprite 0
Set the new animation texture.
Draw sprite 1
.
.
.
Set the new animation texture.
Draw sprite 998
Set the new animation texture.
Draw sprite 999
Gah! Before drawing every sprite you would have to set the render state to use a different texture and this is much slower than adjusting a couple of UV's.
Many (most?) graphics cards require power-of-two, square dimensions for images. So for example 128x128, 512x512, etc. Many/most sprites, however, are not such dimensions. You then have two options:
Round the sprite image up to the nearest power-of-two square. A 16x32 sprite becomes twice as large with transparent pixel padding to 32x32. (this is very wasteful)
Pack multiple sprites into one image. Rather than padding with transparency, why not pad with other images? Pack in those images as efficiently as possible! Then just render segments of the image, which is totally valid.
Obviously the second choice is much better, with less wasted space. So if you must pack several sprites into one image, why not pack them all in the form of a sprite sheet?
So to summarize, image files when loaded into the graphics card must be power-of-two and square. However, the program can choose to render an arbitrary rectangle of that texture to the screen; it doesn't have to be power-of-two or square. So, pack the texture with multiple images to make the most efficient use of texture space.
Sprite sheets tend to be smaller
files (since there's only 1 header
for the whole lot.)
Sprite sheets load quicker as there's
just one disk access rather than
several
You can easily view or adjust multiple frames
at once
Less wasted video memory when you
load the whole lot into one surface
(as Ricket has said)
Individual sprites can be delineated by offsets (eg. on an implicit grid - no need to explicitly mark or note each sprite's position)
There isn't a massive benefit for using sprite sheets, but several small ones. But the practice dates back to a time before most people were using proper 2D graphics software to make game graphics so the artist workflow wasn't necessarily the most important thing back then.
I have 3 nice and puffy clouds I made in Photoshop, all the same size, now I would like to animate them so they appear like they were moving in the background. I want this animation to be the base background in all my scenes (menu,settings, score, game).
I'm using cocos2d, I have setup the menus and the buttons so the work but how do I accomplish this?
I was thinking to add this as a layer, any other suggestions?
Can anyone show me how some code how to make this please?
David H
A simple way to do it is with sine and cosine. Have slighly different parameters (period and amplitude) to ensure that the user doesn't realise (as easily) that they are programmatically animated.
You may also want to play with animating the opacity value. I'm not sure if layers have those, otherwise you'll have to add the clouds to separate nodes or images and applying it to them.
It's hard to be more specific without knowing what the images look like.
The simplest way to animate anything is to add the sprite to the scene, set the position and call something like...
[myClouds runAction:[CCMoveBy actionWithDuration:10 position:CGPointMake(200, 0)]];
This will slide the sprite 200px to the right over 10 seconds. As Srekel suggested, you can play around with some trig functions to get a more natural feel and motion paths, but you'll have to schedule a selector and iteratively reposition the elements.
The more difficult part of your questions is about getting the animation in the background of all scenes. Keep in mind that when you switch scenes, you're unloading one node hierarchy and loading a new one. The background cannot be shared. You CAN, however, duplicate the sprites and animation in all scenes, but when you transition between them there will be a jump.