I'm trying to build a weather application on the iPad but it seems that I need some help in animation. Say I'm animating a Radar, so the radar source files have 10 gif/jpeg pictures in 900x700 pixel size. I've tried the UIImage animation technique using the tutorial here:
http://www.icodeblog.com/2009/07/24/iphone-programming-tutorial-animating-a-game-sprite/
but it seems that loading 10 images that big is too much for the iPad to handle and its crashing due to memory warnings. I'm researching other techniques to animate but I can't seem to find something that will do this efficiently.
I've looked at others like Core Animation using sprites, and Cocos2D with sprites. Can someone point in the right direction the best way to animate these big images? (keep in mind that these images are dynamic and changes often so the sprites will have to be recreated on a server and fetched from the iPad to do the animation). Thanks
OpenGL only creates textures with dimensions at powers of 2. In the case of your images, that's 1024x1024, which is a meg of memory per image. Still, that shouldn't be a problem with the iPad.
First, investigate using Xcode's profiling tools to ensure the images aren't being repeatedly loaded into memory at each loop of the animation (likely by way of new objects that aren't sharing cached textures). That could solve your problem from the start.
Second, I recommend using Cocos2D if only for the easy handling of textures and caching. Toss the images into a CCAnimation, pop that into a CCRepeatForever, run it with a CCSequence. When you're done hit CCTextureCache to release unused textures.
Third, lower your animation framerate to 30 or less (if only for this animation). It may be the iPad, but you making a weather app. Not a video game.
Finally, downgrade the size of your image. Justify all you want, but a large radar animation will not sell your app. And just because a website might already be playing that animation beautifully, remember that a desktop has vastly more memory and power than any smart phone.
Try breaking the animation image into into smaller parts and animate those instead by treating each components as sprites. It would be best if you use primarily code (CoreGraphics) and draw your radar "by hand" instead of just using images as if they were animated GIFs.
Related
I want to make a pool game where the user can pinch the pool table to zoom so he can
precisely shoot the pocket.
So, this means I need a large pool table graphic.
What is the best way to handle such a situation in cocos2d?
How do I load the graphic? What is the limitation on graphic size?
I have a lot of doubts because Im not sure which path to take.
Regards
Mirza
For something as simple as a pool table it might be better to render it all using vector graphics. This means you will need less graphics (perhaps only a few for textures) and you get infinite zooming without all the graphic image overhead.
I've created many types of interfaces using the Cocoa API — some of them using documented basic animation techniques and others simply by experimenting (such as placing an animated .gif inside an NSImage class) — which had somewhat catastrophic consequences. The question I have is what is the correct or the most effective way to create an animated and dynamic GUI so that it runs optimally and properly?
The closest example I can think of that would use a similar type of animation would be something one might see done in flash on any number of interactive websites or interfaces. I'm sure flash can be used in a Cocoa app, although if there is a way to achieve a similar result without re-inventing the wheel, or having to use 3rd party SDKs, I would love to get some input. Keep in mind I'm not just thinking of animation for games, iOS, etc. — I'm most interested in an animated GUI for Mac OS X, and making it 'flow' as one might interact in it.
If u wish to add many graphics animations, then go for OpenGLES based xcode project for iOS. That helps u to reduce performance problem. You can render each of the frames in gif as 2D texture.
I would recommend that you take a look at Core Animation. It is Apples framework for hardware accelerated animations for both OS X and iOS. It's built for making animated GUIs.
You can animate the property changes for things like position, opacity, color, transforms etc and also animate gradients with CAGradientLayer and animate non-rectagunal shapes using CAShapeLayer and a lot of other things.
A good resource to get you started is the Core Animation Programming Guide.
I have been reading for several hours now documentation about drawing two dimensional graphics in a objective-c cocoa application. There appears to be several different technologies all specific to certain tasks. My understanding is that the following technologies do the following things. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Quartz 2D: The primary library for drawing shapes, text, and images to the screen.
Core Graphics: this is the name of the framework that contains Quartz. This can be used as a synonym for Quartz.
QuartzGL: A GPU acceleration mode for Quartz that is not enabled by default and not necessarily faster for drawing things on the screen.
OpenGL: The most low level library, talk directly to the graphics card at the cost of more lines of code. More suited for 3D graphics.
Core Image: A library for displaying images and text, but not so much for drawing shape primitives.
Core Animation: A library for automatically animating objects. Apparently not suited for moving large numbers of objects. Nor for continuous animation of objects.
QuickTime: A library that apparently also does images and text in addition to video, but probably not good for drawing primitive shapes.
What I would like to do is create a browser for some specific type of data. The view would not very complicated and would consist of drawing rectangles at specific locations. However, the user should be able to move around by dragging the view to the left or the right and the this movement should be fluid. Here is a example that is very close to what I'm trying to make:
http://jbrowse.org/ucsc/hg19/
What drawing technology would you recommand I start coding with?
You want Quartz. Unless your graphing MASSIVE amounts of data, any Mac (I'm assuming Mac not iOS) should handle it easily. It is easy, efficient, and will probably get you where you need to go. For the dragging movement, you'll probably manage that with Core Animation layers.
Note: Everything in the end is handled by AppKit (Mac) or UIKit (iOS) and, eventually, Core Animation. If you're doing graphics, you will encounter Core Animation at some point, as it manages everything displayed.
Note: If you are graphing that much data, you can use OpenGL, but even then, the need shouldn't be too much until you start displaying, probably many millions of vertices or complex visualisations.
I'm making a game using UIView.
I use a large (8192x8192) UIView as the map area, (the game is birds-eye-view) with a UIImageView stretched across it displaying a grass texture.
This uses heaps of memory, doesn't run on older devices and nearly crashes Xcode whenever I try to edit it...
Is there an alternate method of creating a 8192x8192 map, but without being laggy?
If it's possible to tile your graphics, something involving CATiledLayer would probably be a good fit. CATiledLayer allows you to provide only the images that are necessary to display the currently viewable area of the view (just like Maps does).
Here is some example code for displaying a large PDF.
I have a game that's moving fewer than 10 small animated UIImageViews at once, maximum. I'm driving their animation with a CADisplay timer running at 60fps. Here is an example of how I move the views in my update method:
// for each insect in insectArray
insectView.center = insect.hitCenter // I pull a position from my model object
The graphics are 32 x 32 pixels with up to 5 animation frames each, if that helps. They have an alpha channel for transparency. I've profiled and eliminated any in-game calculations as a bottleneck. I've also made the opacity property = YES, for a very small speedup. Having the animated frames playing or not makes no difference.
The frame rates are mostly great, except on older devices like the iPhone 1G and 3G. There I get intermittent stuttering.
Before switching to OpenGL, is there any way to get a bit more performance?
I experienced the same kind of bottleneck with CoreAnimation; it is very limited in terms of system complexity that you can display with decent performance. From what I have read and discussed with others, there is no silver bullet for you (or me) there, sorry!
My usage was actually quite close to yours (no animated frames, though), and using OpenGL ES made it go from painfully sluggish to perfectly snappy, so there's hope for you!
CoreAnimation isn't designed for frame-by-frame animation, you tell it a few keyframes and times, and it will do the rest for you. Why not switch to OpenGL? You can't support the old devices forever...
I agree with FX that there is no silver bullet, but if you provided a little more code, we could make some specific suggestions. Here are a few general ones:
Don't round corners using -setCornerRadius on the UIImageView's layer. You'd never believe how much this can degrade performance
If you're using drop shadows behind your view, make sure you specify a shadow path on the layer as well.
Try turning -shouldRasterize on on the UIImageView layer: [[insectView layer] setShouldRasterize:YES];
Hate to say it, but after this, as others have said, OpenGL is the only other choice.