HTML5 Large canvas - dynamic

I've noticed that when dynamically creating a large canvas (6400x6400) that quite alot of the time nothing will be drawn on it, and when setting the canvas to a small size it works 100% of the time, however as I don't know any better, I have no other choice than to try and get the large canvas working correctly.
thisObj.oMapCanvas = jQuery( document.createElement('canvas') ).attr('width', 6400).attr('height', 6400).css('border','1px solid green').prependTo( thisObj.oMapLayer ).get(0);
// getContext and then drawing stuff here...
The purpose of the canvas is to simply draw a line between two nodes (images), which are within a div container that can be dragged around (viewport I think people call them).
What I "think" may be happening is that on a canvas resize it emptys the canvas, and that is interfering with the context drawing, as like I said previously it works all the time when the canvas is alot smaller.
Has anyone experienced this before and/or know any possible solutions?

That is an enormous sized canvas. 6400 x 6400 x 4 bytes per pixel is 156 MB, and your implementation may need to allocate two or more buffers of that size, for double buffering, or need to allocate video memory of that size as well. It's going to take a while to allocate and clear all that memory, and you may not be guaranteed to succeed at such an allocation. Is there a reason you need such an enormous canvas? You could instead try sizing your canvas to be only as large as necessary to draw the line between those two divs, or you could try using SVG instead of a canvas.
Another possibility would be to try dividing your canvas up into large tiles, and only rendering those tiles that are actually visible on the screen. Google Maps does this with images, to only load images for the portion of the map that is currently visible (plus some extra one each side of the screen to make sure that when you scroll you won't need to wait for it to render), maintaining an illusion that there is an enormous canvas while really only rendering something a bit bigger than the window.

Most browsers that implement HTML5 are still in early beta - so it's quite likely they are still working the bugs out.
However, the resolution of the canvas you are trying to create is very high .. much higher than what most people's monitors can even display. Is there are reason you need it quite so large? Why not restrict the draggable area to something more in line with typical display resolutions?

I had the same problem! I was trtying to use a big canvas to connect some divs. Eventually I gave up and drew a line using javascript (I drew my line using little images as pixels- I did it with divs first, but in IE the divs came out too big).

Related

Culling off-screen objects in OpenGL ES 2 2D

I'm playing about with OpenGL ES 2.0. If I'm working with a simple 2D projection, if I have a large 2D grid of vertices which are pretty much static (think map tiles), of which only a small proportion are visible at any one time, would it be better to...
Work out in the CPU which vertices are visible, and and create a VBO to draw just those triangles that make up the visible tiles in each frame?
or
Keep a static VBO with the entire tiled grid, and then just rely on the graphics card (RPi, in my case) to clip out the off-screen triangles?
Or perhaps some combination of the two (like sets of overlapping pre-computed grids)? How big does the grid have to be before the latter option becomes unworkable?
Edit
I decided to make several calls to glDrawElements(), drawing sub-ranges of the index buffer that I knew would overlap the viewport. At the scale I'm working at it doesn't seem to make any difference to the speed over drawing the entire element array, even on a Pi Zero.
However, this approach would require more computation to determine which ranges of elements needed to be rendered if there was any rotation of the grid involved - effectively rasterising my own quad. I'm interested to hear if this is a reasonable approach.
There are some other options like a more exotic structure for breaking up the plane into sub areas, I guess. Still not sure if any of this is really necessary, though.
Thanks!
Please note: I don't want to discuss drawing tiles in the fragment shader, I'm more interested in the correct way to work with the vertex shader than actually solving the described problem.
If that's a regular grid, I'd split it in large chunks, so the screen width (larger side) would fit 2-3 such chunks. They don't need to overlap if it's regular grid.
Checking one chunk's visibility is trivial and cheap, as well as finding/selecting those few that must be drawn. And the wasted/clipped area is small enough to not worry about it. You don't have to go crazy and trim every single vertex that's outside of the screen.
Each chunk would have own VBO, and it would be weakly cached when it goes fully outside of screen, so you don't have to rebuild/reload resources needed to draw that chunk if you quickly return to this part of the map.
Splitting in chunks minimizes the memory requirements and speeds up the level loading. You spend time only loading the part of the screen that user will see immediately. This also allows quite huge maps, since you can prefetch the areas that you're going towards to.

Bootstrap Photo gallery: responsiveness on desktop has bug

Every time the window is sized from big:
http://res.cloudinary.com/liberationfront/image/upload/v1497626018/vb1_t29xlz.png
To small:
https://res.cloudinary.com/liberationfront/image/upload/v1497625905/vb2_gtmjrl.png
There is all of a sudden a gap.
The problem is likely that your images don't all have the exact same aspect ratio, so some of them end up a pixel taller than others in some cases. Then the floated columns don't clear properly.
You can either re-crop your images, which is a fragile solution since you then rely on all future images being perfectly cropped, or you can set your cards' height through CSS and let the images flow to fit. Often using background images gives much more flexibility.
I suggest looking into Bootstrap's responsive embed and setting your images as backgrounds on a child element. Create your own 1:1 class if needed.

libgdx tiledmap flicker with Nearest filtering

I am having strange artifacts on a tiledmap while scrolling with the camera clamped on the player (who is a box2d-Body).
Before getting this issue i used the linear filter for the tiledmap which prevents those strange artifacts from happening but results in Texture bleeding (i loaded the tiledmap straight from a .tmx file without padding the tiles).
However now i am using the Nearest filter instead which gets rid of the bleeding but when scrolling the map (by walking the character with the cam clamped on him) it seams like a lot of pixel are flickering around. The flickering results can get better or worse depending on the cameras zoom value.
But when I use the "OrthoCamController" class from the libgdx-Utilities which allows to scroll the map by panning with the mouse/finger i don't get these artifacts at all.
I assume that the flickering might be caused by bad camera-position values received by the box2d-Body's position.
One more thing i should add here: The game instance runs in 1280*720 display mode while my gamecam renders only 800*480. Wen i change the gamecam's rendersolution to 1280*720 i don't get those artifacts but then the tiles are way too tiny.
Has anyone experienced this issue or knows how to fix that? :)
I had a similar problem with this, and found it was due to having too small a decimal value for the camera position.
I think what may be happening is some sort of rounding with certain tile columns/rows in the tilemap renderer.
I fixed this by rounding to a set accuracy, like so:
camera.position.x = Math.round(player.entity.getX() * scalePosition) / scalePosition;
Experiment with various values, but I got it working by using the tile size as the scalePosition value.
About tilesets, I posted a solution here: Getting gaps between tiled textures with libgdx
I've been using that method with Tiled itself. You will have to adjust "margin" and "spacing" when importing tilesets in Tiled to get the effect working.
It's 100% working for me :)

windows 8 metro app designing for multiple Resolution

I am designing a simple music app where the user gets to play instruments i.e. Drums, and the problem that I am facing is with resolutions.
The drums are images, which I have converted them into buttons. Everything looks great at the state that I have designed it.
However, when I switch to other resolution states, the button(image) are distorted, e.g. skewed, scaled, and looks nasty.
I have tried designing or arranging them via selecting 'Enable state Recording', but the specific designs for that state are not being saved.
Have you tried the approaches discussed here? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465362.aspx For the actual button sizes, make sure you are not fixing the width/height with pixel values. Use * weighted rows and columns to layout your grids and have the buttons autosize to fill a given cell in the grid. Then match with the appropriate image resource per the article.
Grids are great for dividing up available space but they can't account for changes in aspect ratios. If your items are still set to Stretch (or Fill) then they can end up out of aspect ratio. Another option is to design the entire layout at a fixed size (let's say 1024 x 768 or 1366 x 768) and wrap the entire thing in a ViewBox. ViewBox will scale all elements equally and maintain the aspect ratio, adding letterboxing (or empty space) on the sides / top & bottom if necessary. This might be a better approach for a drum kit.
Hope that helps.
Redid the whole project of designing again.
This time, I put the image inside a specific grid and that made things lot better. :)

SpriteSheet, AtlasSprite, Sprite and optimization

I'm developing an iPhone Cocos2D game and reading about optimization. some say use spritesheet whenever possible. others say use atlassprite whenever possible and others say sprite is fine.
I don't get the "whenever possible", when each one can and can't be used?
Also what is the best case for each type?
My game will typically use 100 sprites in a grid, with about 5 types of sprites and some other single sprites. What is the best setup for that? guidelines for deciding for general cases will help too.
Here's what you need to know about spritesheets vs. sprites, generally.
A spritesheet is just a bunch of images put together onto one big image, and then there will be a separate file for image location data (i.e. image 1 starts at coordinate 0,0 with a size of 100,100, image 2 starts at coordinate 100,0, etc).
The advantage here is that loading textures (sprites) is a pretty I/O and memory-alloc intensive operation. If you're trying to do this continually in your game, you may get lags.
The second advantage is memory optimization. If you're using transparent PNGs for your images, there may be a lot of blank pixels -- and you can remove those and "pack" your texture sizes way down than if you used individual images. Good for both space & memory concerns. (TexturePacker is the tool I use for the latter).
So, generally, I'd say it's always a good idea to use a sprite sheet, unless you have non-transparent sprites.