so first I am running an animation.
[self.animationManager runAnimationsForSequenceNamed:#"calibrateButtonOut"];
If I want to run an animation when that animation has ended, what do I write? I can't find a method that is equal to isDone.
The CCBAnimationManager provides two ways to get informed about animations that completed.
Using the setCompletedAnimationCallbackBlock: method. This way the provided block will be exectued for every completed timeline animation. To check the name of the timeline animation that just completed a develeoper can use the lastCompletedSequenceName method.
Implementing the CCBAnimationManagerDelegate protocol and setting a class up as the delegate of the CCBAnimationManager. This way the CCBAnimationManager will call completedAnimationSequenceNamed: for each completed timeline animation.
Related
I have a Cocoa app that draws a lot data to the main screen(31000 samples by about 315 channels) so we are being very studious about profiling and getting everything as efficient as possible. I have a window controller that when opened updates it's view every 2 seconds based on the data. I am using an NSTimer and specifying the view update method.
The problem I am having is every time the timer fires the method, the main display hiccups slightly. I thought it would just be a matter of optimizing the drawRect method in the view subclass, but when I could not find any specific area in the draw rect method where the performance was bad, I decided to try commenting out the contents of the drawRect method.
results:
If I comment out the contents of the drawRect method, I will still get a hiccup.
If I comment out the call to [view setNeedsDisply: YES] in the calling method, it resolves the hiccup.
What Ive Tried:
1) I modified the method calls so that when the timer fired I was using performSelectorOnMainThread to call the view
2) I then tried to use the main dispatch queue with async.
neither of these things worked.
There is some kind of lag happening here even when there is no drawing work to do.
Any help is appreciated.
NOTE: Updated below...
I have a cocoa desktop application which consists of a series of controls around a custom NSView. I am using displayLink to drive the updates.
When a user clicks on an NSControl (a slider, a button, a checkbox, a radio button) the application appears to freeze until the mouse is released. I can confirm in fact that the displayLink callback (getFrameForTime) is NOT firing during the time. If I create a timer, that also does not fire, both remain paused until the user releases the mouse, at which point the application resumes updating.
The control is bound, and if I update that value from another thread (for example, via a callback from a MIDI interface) the slider behaves as expected: it moves, the value updates and the application does not pause.
I feel like this should be a fairly obvious fix, but I'm stumped.
Checking "continuous" in IB does as advertised: sends the values continuously, but still exhibits this behavior (preventing the UI update) until the mouse is released.
This seems to be related specifically to mouseDown on NSControl? Why would this block, and do I really need to subclass all my UI elements to change this behavior (seems extreme)
DisplayLink is in its own thread, so why mouseDown on the main thread block it? If this is the case, given the injunction on updating the Cocoa UI from other than the main thread, how do I deal with it?
Any help much appreciated.
Update
Per #Nikolai's comments below, I can confirm that using an NSTimer and adding it to NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode does NOT block. However, I would really like to use CVDisplayLink which (according to the documentation) runs in it's own thread and should not be blocked in this way. Unlike CADisplayLink, I cannot find a way to explicitly assign a runloop to CVDisplayLink (it seems it doesn't work that way), so perhaps the new question should be:
Why does CVDisplayLink block on NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode?
When clicking on an NSControl the runloop mode goes from NSDefaultRunLoopMode to NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode, as long as the mouse is down. That means that only run loop sources (display link) and timers fire that have been added to this mode.
You can add timers to any mode by using -[NSRunLoop addTimer:forMode:]. For a display link the equivalent method is -[CADisplayLink addToRunLoop:forMode:].
To make your animation continue during event tracking you would do something like:
[myDisplayLink addToRunLoop:[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop]
forMode:NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode];
Your test project shows that you are calling a view's display method from within the display link's callback.
When commenting the display message out, the display link is called continuously even while moving the slider.
So what goes wrong is that when the runloop goes into event tracking mode, the call to display on the display link's thread blocks until the mouse is released and the run loop goes back to default mode. You can easily confirm this by putting a log statement before the call and one after it.
Why exactly that happens is not clear to me. What is clear is that it's illegal to call a view's methods from a background thread. You have to trigger the view's display by dispatching a setNeedsDisplay: on the main thread:
static CVReturn MyDisplayLinkCallback(CVDisplayLinkRef displayLink, const CVTimeStamp* now, const CVTimeStamp* outputTime, CVOptionFlags flagsIn, CVOptionFlags* flagsOut, void* displayLinkContext)
{
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[(__bridge MyCustomView*)displayLinkContext setNeedsDisplay:YES];
});
return kCVReturnSuccess;
}
I'm working on a card game and trying to get cards to deal one after the other. I have a method that animated a card from the deck to a player, and in viewDidLoad I call this method four times. The problem is all four cards get dealt simultaneously. How do I stop a method in its tracks for a period of time?
I know that the scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval method calls another method after a delay, but I'm looking for a way to interrupt the current method after calling the deal method once and then continuing with the rest of the current method. sleep() also doesn't work. I tried putting it between calls to the deal method, but it just executed all the sleep()s and then did all the animation at once again. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!
You are going down the wrong road. Attempting to sleep a method is not the way to approach this. You want to break the task into steps to be performed serially and perform each step only after the previous step is completed.
Say you have a variable called 'cardCounter' and one called 'cardMax'. Then you have a method called 'dealCard'. In viewDidAppear you intialize 'cardCounter` to zero and 'cardMax' to 4 (or however many cards are to be dealt. Then you call the 'dealCard' method.
(actually, you probably want a method called newGame or something since you will likely want to have multiple games and you don't want to tie your game setup to the viewDidAppear event. So in viewDidAppear you would call 'newGame' and do your initialization there.)
- (void)dealCard {
cardCounter++;
if (cardCounter > cardMax){
// all cards are dealt
// call some method to start game
// or do any other set up;
} else {
// call some method to animate the card
// using core animation with a completion handler?
// using a ^block with a completion handler?
// either way, in the completion handler call
// 'dealCard' again
}
A hint. Create a setup method which is called from your init only once! In that setup method you can work with `performSelector" as tomi said. The Selector is "your" method that moves a card from the deck to the player.
(void)performSelector:(SEL)aSelector withObject:(id)anArgument afterDelay:(NSTimeInterval)delay
I've been working recently on some animations and it struck me that there is no delegate method of CAAnimation that updates animation progress. I've tried to use a timer and request a transform from a view being transformed (rotated by z axis) but it always returns the same transform.
Is there any way to get the values being updated by CAAnimation?
If you want the details of the current state of the animation of a layer, query [layer presentationLayer]. You can access the transform property within that object.
Unfortunately, no. However, core animation is time based, so you can always mimic it independently. Also, if you are looking for some discrete precise moments, you can split your animation into a chain and update your state within the animationDidStop callback.
I'm not very familiar with CoreAnimation, so I hope I've just missed something pretty simple. I want to animate a custom property (NSGradient) of a NSView in a simple manner, with [[view animator] setGradient:gradient];. I defined + (id)defaultAnimationForKey:(NSString *)key and returned a simple CABasicAnimation, however, no animation is executed. Since this works for simpler types and NSColor, I guess CABasicAnimation doesn't work with gradients. Fine, but in this particular case gradients are trivial (two stops, always), so I can easily write an interpolation functions. The question: how can I define a custom interpolation? I googled around regarding delegates on view, layer and animations, subclassing animation class etc., but I wasn't able to figure the things out. Thanks!
I thought I remembered passing by some Apple documentation when I was learning how to use Core Animation that showed how to set up animations that couldn't be handled by properticode describedes that are supplied with defined animations. Along the way I stumbled across some sample code from Apple that is described as:
A single gradient layer is displayed and continuously animated using new random colors.
That may be the answer to the specific task you already handled another way. I found it in the Documentation and API Reference within Xcode and the name of the sample code is simply Gradients. (Note that there is an original version 1.0 and an updated version 1.1 that was redone this year in April and so should be easier to use with current tools.
But, the larger question of creating a custom animation that can't be automated by Core Animation itself is to follow the example from Apple's Animation Programming Guide for Cocoa in the section Using an NSAnimation Object. It's described under the topic Subclassing NSAnimation and the recommended method is shown under the heading Smooth Animations. You override the setCurrentProgress: method so that each time it is called you first invoke Super so that NSAnimation updates the progress value, i.e., your custom animated property and then do any updating or drawing needed for the next frame of your animation. Here are the notes and example code provided by Apple in the referenced documentation:
As mentioned in “Setting and Handling Progress Marks,” you can attach a series of progress marks to an NSAnimation object and have the delegate implement the animation:didReachProgressMark: method to redraw an object at each progress mark. However, this is not the best way to animate an object. Unless you set a large number of progress marks (30 per second or more), the animation is probably going to appear jerky.
A better approach is to subclass NSAnimation and override the setCurrentProgress: method, as illustrated in Listing 4. The NSAnimation object invokes this method after each frame to change the progress value. By intercepting this message, you can perform any redrawing or updating you need for that frame. If you do override this method, be sure to invoke the implementation of super so that it can update the current progress.
Listing 4 Overriding the setCurrentProgress: method
- (void)setCurrentProgress:(NSAnimationProgress)progress
{
// Call super to update the progress value.
[super setCurrentProgress:progress];
// Update the window position.
NSRect theWinFrame = [[NSApp mainWindow] frame];
NSRect theScreenFrame = [[NSScreen mainScreen] visibleFrame];
theWinFrame.origin.x = progress *
(theScreenFrame.size.width - theWinFrame.size.width);
[[NSApp mainWindow] setFrame:theWinFrame display:YES animate:YES];
}
So basically you define a "progress value" (possibly composed of several values) that defines the state of your custom animation and write code that given the current "progress value" draws or changes what is drawn when the animation is at that particular state. Then you let NSAnimation run the animation using the normal methods of setting up an animation and it will execute your code to draw each frame of the animation at the appropriate time.
I hope that answers what you wanted to know. I doubt I could have found this easily by searching without having seen it before since I finally had to go to where I thought it might be and skim page by page through the entire topic to find it again!