regarding rotating the map in iOS - objective-c

I am facing this problem while trying to rotate the map in my iPhone app
The view gets clipped and rotation also happens. I want to avoid the clipping. Any tips ?
heres the code:
viewToRotate.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(0.8, 0., 0., 1.);

You need your map rotated in 3D ? If not (which is what I think you need), then just use CGAffineTransformMakeRotation (be careful, as it requires the angle in radians).
Also, if you don't want your map to be clipped, you need to make your map bigger, like in the image below (open in new tab to see it bigger)
http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/4498/calculatemapboundswhenr.png
First, you need to calculate the diagonal of the rectangle (your visible map) as instructed in the image above (which I call "radius" because that would be the radius of the smallest circle bigger than your rectangle).
Second, using the radius, you need to calculate the (smallest) square that will allow your map to be seen without clipping. This square will be used to set the bounds of your map (caution: NOT the frame - Apple specifies that, when using rotation, you should not use frame - just bounds and / or center).
Make sure this square is centered on the center of your visible map rectangle (i.e. the square should have X pixels above AND below the small rectangle ... and Y pixels left AND right of the small rectangle).
Hope it helps !

Did you ever figure out the solution?
The only way I could do it was to make the MapView in Interface Builder much bigger than the actual size of the screen area its supposed to cover, then I centered the MapView such that its center was in the center of the narrower viewable area.
Rotation seemed to work similarly to how it works in the built-in Maps app.
My guess is that you have to do this so that the image tiles streaming in from Google cover a wide enough area to "fill in the blanks" so to speak, even if they're not always visable.
If you apply a little math, you could probably programmatically size and position the MapView such that you void clipping, but don't require more tiles than is absolutely necessary.

Related

Parallax effect jitter in libGDX

Basically I'm using this ParallaxCamera class to create the effect in my game, but upon movement, the layers "wiggle". This is especially noticeable when the camera is moving slowly.
I have fixed the timestep and use interpolated smoothing. I use scaled up pixel art. Camera centered on player, updated after movement. Disabling the effect makes moving the camera smooth.
What I guess the issues might be:
the layers move at different paces which means they move at different
times
rounding to display makes the layers assume slightly different positions each frame when moving the camera
Thanks for any help
For low-resolution pixel art, this is the strategy I've used. I draw to a small FrameBuffer at 1:1 resolution and then draw that to the screen. That should take care of jittering.
If your Stage is also at the same resolution, then you have to use a bit of a hack to get input to be processed properly. The one I've used it to use a StretchViewport, but I manually calculate the world width and height to not stretch the world, so I'm basically doing the same calculation that ExtendViewport does behind the scenes. You also have to round to an integer for the width and height. You should do this in resize and apply the width and height using viewport.setWorldWidth() and setWorldHeight(). So in this case it doesn't matter what world size you give to the constructor since it will be changed in update().
When you call update on the viewport in resize, you need to do it within the context of the FrameBuffer you are drawing to. Otherwise it will mess up the screen's frame buffer dimensions.
public void resize(int width, int height) {
int worldWidth = Math.round((float)WORLD_HEIGHT / (float)height * (float)width);
viewport.setWorldWidth(worldWidth);
viewport.setWorldHeight(worldHeight);
frameBuffer.begin();
viewport.update(width, height, true); // the actual screen dimensions
frameBuffer.end();
}
You can look up examples of using FrameBuffer in LibGDX. You should do all your game drawing in between frameBuffer.begin() and end(), and then draw the frameBuffer's color buffer to the screen like this:
stage.act();
frameBuffer.begin();
//Draw game
stage.draw();
frameBuffer.end();
spriteBatch.setProjectionMatrix(spriteBatch.getProjectionMatrix().idt());
spriteBatch.begin();
spriteBatch.draw(frameBuffer.getColorBufferTexture(), -1, 1, 2, -2);
spriteBatch.end();
In my case, I do a more complicated calculation of world width and world height such that they are a whole number factor of the actual screen dimensions. This prevents the big pixels from being different sizes on the screen, which might look bad. Alternatively, you can change the filtering of the FrameBuffer's texture to linear and use an upscaling shader when drawing it.

How to place the camera so that it shows a 2d area of variable size in full?

I'm making an application that generates a 2D area (you can think of it as a drawing), with a camera hovering over it. The size of said drawing isn't known in advance, and could change greatly. After the "drawing" is generated, I want to position the camera so that the whole drawing is in view.
My original idea was to calculate the points that are at the top, bottom, left, and right of the drawing and having the camera move back, "zooming out" until they are all in sight, but there has to be a better way, right?
Assuming you are working in 2D (thus orthographic camera mode), you can set the camera's orthographicSize:
Camera.main.orthographicSize = height / 2F; //half of the height of the area
Then, set the aspect ratio (width / height):
Camera.main.aspect = 1F; //for example, a square area

Change NSImage Origin

Is it possible to change the origin of an NSImage? If so how would I go about doing this. I have coordinates in regular cartesian system some of them with negative values and I am trying to draw them at the corresponding point in the NSImage but since the origin is at (0,0) there are some missing.
EDIT:Say I have an drawing aspect that needs to be done to an image at the point (-10,-10), currently this doesn't show up. Is there a way to fix that?
If it's like in iOS (you may have to adapt a little the code) and if my memory is still good, you have to do this, since origin is readOnly:
CGRect myFrame = yourImage.frame;
myFrame.origin.x=newX; myFrame.origin.y=newY;
yourImage.frame = myFrame;
I think you are confusing an NSImage with it's container. An NSImage has no bounds or frame, and thus no origin. It does have a size which may represent the pixel dimensions of its birtmap representation ( if it has one) or otherwise could represent it's bounding box ( if it is a vector image). Drawing in an image at a pixel location of (-10,-10) doesn't really make sense.
An NSImage is displayed in a container ( typically an NSImageView), and the container's bounds.origin will dictate the placement of the image relative to the imageView, but you can't modify pixels beyond the edge of the bitmap plane.
In any case you probably want to be using a subclassed NSView in which you would override the drawRect method for your custom drawing. NSView does have a bounds.origin but this is not relevant to your in-drawing coordinates, but rather to the position of the drawn content as a whole to the view's bounding box. The coordinate system that you will be drawing into will be referenced to your graphics context which will (usually) pin the origin (0,0) to the bottom left corner (OSX) or top left corner (iOS). If you are trying to represent negative points on a Cartesian plane, you will need to apply a translation transform to map your points into this positive coordinate space.
I'm trying to explain in a few words, badly, something which Apple explains in great detail in their Quartz 2D Programming Guide.

How to render a 2d side-scroller game

I do not really understand the way I'm suppose to render a side-scroller? How do I know what to render when my character move? What kind of positionning should I use for the characters?
I hope my question is clear
The easiest way i've found to do it is have a characterX and characterY variable [integer or float, whatever you want] Then have a cameraX and cameraY variable. Every object in the scene is drawn at theObjectX-cameraX, theObjectY-cameraY...
CameraX/CameraY are tweened by a similar-to-midpoint formula so eventually they'll reach playerx/playery[Cx = (Cx*99+Px)/100] ... yeah
By doing this, every object moves in the stage's space, and is transformed only on render [saving you from headaches]
Use a matrix to define a camera reference frame.
Use space partitioning to split up your level into screens/windows.
Think of your player sprite as any other entity, like enemies and interactive objects.
Now what you want is the abstraction of a camera. You can define a camera as a 3x3 matrix with this layout:
[rotX_X, rotY_X, 0]
[rotX_Y, rotY_Y, 0]
[transX, transY, 1]
The 2x2 sub-matrix in the top-left corner is a rotation matrix. transX and transY defines the translation part, i.e the origin. You also get scaling for free. Just simply scale the rotation part with a scalar, and you have yourself a zoom.
For this to work properly with rotation, your sprites need to be polygons/primitives, say like triangles or quads; you can't just apply the matrix to the positions of the sprites when drawing. If you don't need rotation, just transforming the center point will work fine.
If you want the camera to follow the player, use the player's position as the camera origin. That is the translation vector [transX, transY]
So how do you apply the matrix to entity positions and model vertices? You do a vector-matrix multiplication.
v' = vM^-1, where v' is the new vector, v is the old vector, and M^-1 is the matrix inverse. A camera needs to be an inverse transform because it defines a local coordinate system. An analogy could be: If you are in front of me and I turn left from my reference frame, I am turning your right. This applies to all affine and linear transformations, like scaling, rotation and translation.
Split up your level into sub-parts so you can cull objects and scenery which does not need to be rendered. Your viewport is of a certain size/resolution. Only render scenery and entities which intersect with your viewport. Instead of checking each and every entity against the viewport bounds, assign each entity to a certain sub-screen and test the bounds of the sub-screen against the viewport and camera bounds. If your divide your levels into parts which are the same size as your viewport, then the maximum number of screens visible
at any particular time is:
2 if your camera only scrolls left and right.
4 if your camera scrolls left, right, up and down.
4 if your camera scrolls in any direction, and additionally can be rotated.
A screen-change is an event you can use to activate entities belonging to that screen. That could be enemies, background animations, doors or whatever you like.
If this is your first foray into writing a side-scroller, I'd suggest considering using an already existing game engine (like Construct or Gamemaker or XNA or whatever fits your experience level) so you don't have to worry about what order to render things and how to make it all work. Mess with that a bit--probably exploring a few of them--to get a feel for how they do things then venture out to your own once you've gotten used to it.
Not that there's anything wrong with baptism by fire but it can get pretty overwhelming in my opinion.

How To Draw More Precise Lines using Core Graphics and CALayer

Hello I am having a hard time making this UI element look the way I want (see screenshot). Notice the image on the right--how the line width and darkness looks inconsistent compared to the image on the left (which happens to be a screen grab from safari) where the border width is more consistent. How does apple make their lines so perfect?
I'm using a CALayer and the Core Graphics API to draw the image on the right. Is it possible to draw such perfect lines with the standard apis?
The problem with drawing a 1-pixel path is that Quartz draws paths on an exact point grid, starting from {0,0}. This means that if you stroke a vertical path starting at {10,10} with a 1-point width, half of that line will render in the pixel to the left of the coordinate and half in the pixel to the right, causing a blurring effect.
You should therefore shift your drawing by {0.5,0.5} if you want lines to draw on exact pixels.
You can definitely draw what you want with Quartz.
Apple uses images for the tab elements.