Deconstructing slot machine reels? - reverse-engineering

I have a movie of slot machine game play. How to extract only movie frames when the reels are stopped? During spinning game shows fake symbols, which are not part of the game mathematics. Until now I am doing it manually (by screen shots), which takes too much time and it will be nice to be automated.
I know how to do image processing of single images and I get segments of symbols for each reel. Can you suggest me an algorithm with which to connect different segments and to deconstruct original strips? It is like a puzzle solving, but without clear information for the number of pieces and how exactly they match.

Related

How to save game status in as3?

I have lots (up to hundreds of thousand) of graphics object created by as3 classes.I know that I can save parameters of the game in shared objects to use them when program restarts, but it seems it is not good enough. I want to save exact picture|status of all graphic objects to redraw them when program restarts. Is there a good way to do that? Is there limitations on size or number of shared objects to save types, sizes, coordinates, colors, and etc. of all of the thousands of objects?

why game is running slow in libgdx?

I am making racing game in Libgdx.My game apk size is 9.92 mb and I am using four texture packer of total size is 9.92 Mb. My game is running on desktop but its run on android device very slow. What is reason behind it?
There are few loopholes which we neglect while programming.
Desktop processors are way more powerful so the game may run smoothly on Desktop but may slow on mobile Device.
Here are some key notes which you should follow for optimum game flow:
No I/O operations in render method.
Avoid creating Objects in Render Method.
Objects must be reused (for instance if your game have 1000 platforms but on current screen you can display only 3, than instead of making 1000 objects make 5 or 6 and reuse them). You can use Pool class provided by LibGdx for object pooling.
Try to load only those assets which are necessary to show on current screen.
Try to check your logcat if the Garbage collector is called. If so than try to use finalize method of object class to find which class object are collected as garbage and try to improve on it.
Good luck.
I've got some additional tips for improving performance:
Try to minimize texture bindings (or generally bindings when you're making a 3D game for example) in you render loop. Use texture atlases and try to use one texture after binding as often as possible, before binding another texture unit.
Don't display things that are not in the frustum/viewport. Calculate first if the drawn object can even be seen by the active camera or not. If it's not seen, just don't load it onto your GPU when rendering!
Don't use spritebatch.begin() or spritebatch.end() too often in the render loop, because every time you begin/end it, it's flushed and loaded onto the GPU for rendering its stuff.
Do NOT load assets while rendering, except you're doing it once in another thread.
The latest versions of libgdx also provide a GLProfiler where you can measure how many draw calls, texture bindings, vertices, etc. you have per frame. I'd strongly recommend this since there always can be situations where you would not expect an overhead of memory/computational usage.
Use libgdx Poolable (interface) objects and Pool for pooling objects and minimizing the time for object creation, since the creation of objects might cause tiny but noticable stutterings in your game-render loop
By the way, without any additional information, no one's going to give you a good or precise answer. If you think it's not worth it to write enough text or information for your question, why should it be worth it to answer it?
To really understand why your game is running slow you need to profile your application.
There are free tools avaiable for this.
On Desktop you can use VisualVM.
On Android you can use Android Monitor.
With profiling you will find excatly which methods are taking up the most time.
A likely cause of slowdowns is texture binding. Do you switch between different pages of packed textures often? Try to draw everything from one page before switching to another page.
The answer is likely a little more that just "Computer fast; phone slow". Rather, it's important to note that your computer Java VM is likely Oracles very nicely optimized JVM while your phone's Java VM is likely Dalvik, which, to say nothing else of its performance, does not have the same optimizations for object creation and management.
As others have said, libGDX provides a Pool class for just this reason. Take a look here: https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Memory-management
One very important thing in LibGDX is that you should make sure that sometimes loading assets from the memory cannot go in the render() method. Make sure that you are loading the assets in the right times and they are not coming in the render method.
Another very important thing is that try to calculate your math and make it independent of the render in the sense that your next frame should not wait for calculations to happen...!
These are the major 2 things i encountered when I was making the Snake game Tutorial.
Thanks,
Abhijeet.
One thing I have found, is that drawing is laggy. This means that if you are drawing offscreen items, then it uses a lot of useless resources. If you just check if they are onscreen before drawing, then your performance improves by a lot surprisingly.
Points to ponder (From personal experience)
DO NOT keep calling a function,in render method, that updates something like time,score on HUD (Make these updates only when required eg when score increases ONLY then update score etc)
Make calls IF specific (Make updations on certain condition, not all the time)
eg. Calling/updating in render method at 60FPS - means you update time 60 times a sec when it just needs to be updated once per sec )
These points will effect hugely on performance (thumbs up)
You need to check the your Image size of the game.If your image size are more than decrease the size of images by using the following link "http://tinypng.org/".
It will be help you.

Sound Manager for RTS Games

I am creating an RTS game in flash, AS3 for the Epic Flash Game design Contest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpFBraUbHyo&list=UUfkxvxrvpNxXvdKusYS0NfQ&index=1
Am almost done, except that creating the class which manages all the sounds is being quite a pain.
Basically there are only 32 available SoundChannels for AS3 before the buffer overflows. But unfortunately, my RTS handles several dozens of units fighting at the same time, and each unit, especially rifle soldiers fire multiple shots at a time.
If I let each sound effect be sounded, the buffer would overflow, even if it does not, it would sound very noisy and messy.
so the question is, I have seen games like starcraft in the market where there are hundreds of units on screen, yet the sound is pretty "unnoisy" and organised. I would like to ask how those people achieved this effect? What sounds do they accept or filter out?
Currently I have 3 possible models:
1)First in, first out model: Accept all sounds being played, but as soon as the buffer limit is reached, the earliest sound in the buffer is silenced.
2) Accept or reject model: Accept all sounds until the buffer overflows, then reject all further plays until sounds end and the buffer empties.
3) Loudest only model: Currently my game has a variety of sounds of different loudness, for example, explosions are louder than gunfire effects. In this model, the loudest 32 sounds are being played, if a sound enters which is among the top 32, the lowest of the 32 is "kicked" and the sound replaces it.
Which model is best, or perhalps you can suggest your own model =p.
maybe also consider using different soundfiles for "single" vs "mass" events...
1 space ship - play "single spaceship sound"
2 space ships - play "single spaceship sound" twice
3 or more space ships - play "many space ships sound"
...grouping the sounds in the buffer by type might be a good idea anyway, as you easily could silence one "space ship sound" if there are too many of those, without silencing other elements.

Actionscript: Playing sound from microphone on speakers (through buffer) with constant delay

I'm looking for an example of code that samples signal from microphone and
plays it on speakers. I need a solution that has a resonably constant delay on
different platforms (PC, android, iphone). Delay around 1-2 s is ok for me, and I don't
mind if it varies everytime the application starts.
I tried using SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA event on Sound and Microphpne classess.
One event would put data into buffer the other would read data.
But it seems impossible to provide constant delay, either the delay grows constantly or
it gets lower to the point where I have less than 2048 samples to put out and Sound class stops
generating SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA events.
I wan't to process each incoming frame so using setLoopBack(true) is not an option.
ps This is more a problem on Android devices than on PC. Althought when I start to resize application
window on PC delay starts to grow also.
Please help.
Unfortunately, this won't be possible... at least not directly.
Some sound devices will use a different clock between recording and playback. This will be especially true for cell phones where what is running the microphone may very well be different hardware than the headphone audio output.
Basically, if you record at 44.1kHz and play back at 44.1kHz, but those clocks are not in sync, you may be recording at 44.099kHz and play back at 44.101kHz. Over time, this drift will mean that you won't have enough data in the buffer to send to the output.
Another complication (and more than likely your problem) is that your record and playback sample rates may be different. If you record from the microphone at 11kHz and playback at 48kHz, you will note that 11 doesn't evenly fit into 48. Software is often used to up-sample the recording. Sometimes this is done with a nice algorithm which is guaranteed to give you the necessary output. Other times, that 11kHz will get pushed to 44kHz and is deemed "close enough".
In short, you cannot rely on recording and playback devices being in sync, and will need to synchronize yourself. There are many algorithms out there for handling this. The easiest method is to add a sample here and there that averages the sample before and after it. If you do this with just a few samples, it will be inaudible. Depending on the kind of drift problem you are having, this may be sufficient.

AS3: How to access pixel data efficiently?

I'm working a game.
The game requires entities to analyse an image and head towards pixels with specific properties (high red channel, etc.)
I've looked into Pixel Bender, but this only seems useful for writing new colors to the image. At the moment, even at a low resolution (200x200) just one entity scanning the image slows to 1-2 Frames/second.
I'm embedding the image and instance it as a Bitmap as a child of the stage. The 1-2 FPS situation is using BitmapData.getPixel() (on each pixel) with a distance calculation beforehand.
I'm wondering if there's any way I can do this more efficiently... My first thought was some sort of spatial partioning coupled with splitting the image up into many smaller pieces.
I also feel like Pixel Bender should be able to help somehow, however I've had little experience with it.
Cheers for any help.
Jonathan
Let us call the pixels which entities head towards "attractors" because they attract the entities.
You describe a low frame rate due to scanning for attractors. This indicates that you may possibly be scanning an image at every frame. You don't specify whether the image scanned is static or changes as frequently as, e.g., a video input. If the image is changing with every frame, so that you must re-calculate attractors somehow, then what you are attempting is real-time computer vision with the ABC Virtual Machine, please see below.
If you have an unchanging image, then the most important optimization you can make is to scan the image one time only, then save a summary (or "memoization") of the locations of the attractors. At each rendering frame, rather than scan the entire image, you can search the list or array of known attractors. When the user causes the image to change, you can recalculate from scratch, or update your calculations incrementally -- as you see fit.
If you are attempting to do real-time computer vision with ActionScript 3, I suggest you look at the new vector types of Flash 10.1 and also that you look into using either abcsx to write ABC assembly code, or use Adobe's Alchemy to compile C onto the Flash runtime. ABC is the byte code of Flash. In other words, reconsider the use of AS3 for real-time computer vision.
BitmapData has a getPixels method (notice it's plural). It returns a byte array of all the pixels which can be iterated much faster than a for loop with a call to getPixel inside, nested inside another for loop . Unfortunately, bytearrays are, as their name implies, 1 dimensional arrays of bytes, so iterating each pixel(4 bytes) requires using a for loop, not a foreach loop. You can access each pixel's color channel individually by default, but this sounds like what you want (find pixels with a "high red channel"), so you won't have to bitwise-and each pixel value to isolate a particular channel.
I read somewhere that getPixel is very slow, so that's where I figured you'd save the most. I could be wrong, so it'd be worth timing it.
I would say Heath Hunnicutt's anwser is a good one. If the image doesnt change just store all the color values in a vector. or byteArray of whatever and use it as a lookup table so you don't need to call getPixel() every frame.