Is there a way to acquire a different overall screen resolution for an LWJGL game? By this I mean doing a "Nearest Neighbor" pixel transformation for everything that is being rendered.
Best regards,
Foru
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Recently began learning scene2d and developed a card game with it. I used world units for my coordinate system whereby one card width is 1f. The center of the screen is (0, 0) using world units.
Now I'm trying to draw a label on the center card placed at (1,0) but it's showing extremely large, no matter how much i scale the font, and i can't scale less than 0.05f.
I did extensive research and found out here that i can use camera.project for this, tried but couldn't work quite well. I'd appreciate any examples.
The goal is to temporarily project my world coordinates to screen coordinates, draw the text at the required position and with the correct size(in screen pixels), then unproject the stage back to world units, and continue further processes.
I'd show code if asked to, but i really just require some guidance here.
I've spent several hours trying to work around this issue... when rendering really simple shape (ie. a cube with very low complexity) and using a texture map feature of Three.js, when you rotate the cube the image seems to be distorted while in rotation, and then you can see a line which runs across the surface of the cube which appears as distortion.
http://screencast.com/t/VpSPRsr1Jkss
I understand that is a limitation of canvas rendering - but it seems like this is is a really simple thing to do - rotate a cube that has an image on one face without the distortion.
Is there another canvas library or approach i can take? I was really looking forward to using Three.js for animating some logos and other elemnets - but we can't have distortion like that in a logo or a customer facing landing page.
Thanks for reading, I'm open to suggestions here.
I don't accept increasing the complexity of the face as a solution because that just distributes the distortion through out the face. I really just want to render the image to a flat surface and be able to rotate that object.
The distortion you see is because only two triangles make that plane.
A quick fix is to have more detailed plane.
If you are using PlaneGeometry, increase the number of segments.
If you are using CubeGeometry, increase the number of segments on the plane you need (2 out of 3).
It will take a bit of fiddling to find the best balance between a decent look and optimal performance (as more segments will require more computing). Hopefully for simple scene you'll get away with no major delays.
I am working on a map application and I have come across an issue with how my tiles are laying while scaling.
Here is a basic look at my structure:
There is obviously a lot more going on, but you get the idea. Now, I scale the Map App Sprite to zoom in. When that scaling occurs, there is a gap between each tile.
You can see the gap where 4 tiles meet here:
I am caching everything as a bitmap. For each Layer (which all extend Bitmap), I have smoothing set to true and pixelSnapping set to PixelSnapping.ALWAYS (pixel snapping shouldn't help here, but it shouldn't hurt either).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this issue?
(For the sake of completeness, the Map app is built entirely using AS3 and it is embedded in a Flex app)
Using integers for tile x,y locations and calculating those locations correctly is most likely the fix here, unless the images have seams in them!
The code that calculates and sets the x,y locations would be needed to properly pinpoint the issue in the code.
But, also if you are scaling that container sprite, you would want to ensure that you scale so that the width/height of a tile is an integer value.
For example, if you scale your sprite that contains these tiles, the widths/heights of the individual tiles might not always be integers, therefore creating those seams you see.
What you could do in that case is do your scaling by adjusting your width/height values by integer values, taking into account proportions, as opposed to using scaleX and scaleY on your container sprite.
Without seeing your code it's difficult to be sure, but it is possibly just a visual artifact due to scaling - eg: a 250px wide bitmap scaled to 155% should be rendered at 387.5px wide but thats impossible so its rendered at 388px wide - with the 0.5px part rendered as 1px at 50% alpha to give 'appearance' of 0.5px.
Ensuring scaled bitmaps widths/heights are always integers may solve it?
This looks like a rounding error.
Without code it's hard to know: it would be a great asset to you and us if posted a barebones example of your tiling class. In the process of subtraction you may very well discover your solution.
I'd offer that you should test what happens when you scale and algin four 100x100 bitmap images at various fine grain steps, to detect if it's a Flash rendering issue or a defect in your class.
When I put my Flash game into full screen interactive display mode and set stage.fullScreenSourceRect so that it uses hardware scaling, the performance at any resolution seems to be much better than if I do it without the fullScreenSourceRect. I'd really like to use this feature, but the problem is that it seems to be using a 4x blur or some similar algorithm for scaling that leaves everything looking very blurry.
It seems like an odd choice to have a blur as the only available scale mode. I would be much happier with a simple nearest-neighbor. I can't find anything about changing the scale algorithm in the documentation. Is there any way to do this while still using hardware acceleration?
What is the intended platform for this game? If this is mobile, then there are standards that can be implemented to ensure the ideal resolutions. If this is for web then, I would recommend defining rigid dimensions. Otherwise in my experience, its best to develop to your display's ideal native resolutions. Unless you have your code dynamically drawing objects to your stage, the there will always be some kind of rastering/interpolation. You can also get your screens resolutions and have the code make adjustments accordingly: How do I get the user's screen resolution in ActionScript 3?
I've developed a lot of touch screen applications that span multiple displays with different resolutions and AIR has some great options in it's 'Screen' class to make the process easier.
I hope this isn't too open ended.
I'm wondering if there is a better (more battery-friendly) way of doing this --
I have a small HTML 5 game, drawn in a canvas (let's say 500x500). I have some objects whose positions I update every 50ms or so. My current implementation re-draws the entire canvas every 50ms. I can't imagine that being very good for battery life on mobile platforms.
Is there a better way to do this? This must be a common pattern with games.
EDIT:
as requested, here are some more updates:
Right now, the objects are geometric primitives drawn via arcs and lines. I'm not opposed to making these small png/jpg/gif files instead of that'd help out. These are small graphics -- just 15x15 or so.
As the game progresses, more and more of the screen changes at a time. However, at the start, the screen changes relatively slowly (the objects randomly moved a few pixels every 50ms).
Nearly every game with continuous animation like this redraws everything every frame; clever updating algorithms are only applicable when a small part of the screen is changing and there is a nice rule to figure out what is overlapping that part.
Here is some general optimization advice:
Make sure that as much as possible of your graphics are handled by the GPU and not the CPU. (This may be impossible if the user's browser does not use the GPU for 2D canvas rendering, but you can expect upgrades may change that as HTML5 gaming gains popularity.)
This means that you should avoid elaborate clever algorithms in favor of doing as little work as possible in JS code — except that avoiding performing a lot of drawing when it is easy to determine that it will be invisible (e.g. outside the bounds of the screen) is generally worthwhile.
If your target platforms support it (generally not the case for current mobile devices), try using WebGL instead of 2D Canvas. You will have to do more detail work, but WebGL allows you to use operations which are much more likely to be provided efficiently by the GPU hardware.
If your game becomes idle — that is, nothing is actually animating at the moment — stop redrawing. Stop your update loop until the user interacts with the game or a timeout occurs.
It may be helpful for you to add to your question details of what types of graphics you are drawing (e.g. are you using sprites, or geometric primitives? Are you drawing images rotated/scaled? Does most of the screen change or just a few small objects? Are you blending many layers?) and perhaps even a screenshot or two; then we can suggest what sort of optimizations are suitable for your particular game.
Don't draw a background, make it an image and set the CSS background-image of the canvas.
Using requestAnimationFrame should help with battery life.
http://paulirish.com/2011/requestanimationframe-for-smart-animating/
Only do a redraw if something has actually changed. If you haven't already, introduce the concept of invalidations. (ie, the canvas is valid so nothing redraws until something moves. Anything moving within the window of the canvas causes the canvas to become invalid, thus needing a redraw)
If you want to be battery friendly you can use Crafty. This game engine is using modern CSS3 technology so it doesn't need to update a canvas all the time. Look at this example game here.
The way you don't want to redraw entire canvas every frame, it only can be the "Dirty-Check" or "Dirty Matrix" algorithms.
Dirty-check seems more efficient than entire redraw. but I think it depends on your render implementation.
it is not necessary to use it if you are using canvas2D to render. Nearly every game has complex sprites and animation. if you use dirty-check, when a part of sprite or background map need to update, you have to figure out what is overlapping this part. and then clearRect this small area of canvas, and then redraw every sprite or map. etc, what is overlapping.
It means your had to run canvas render api more times than normal render implementation because of the overlapping part. And Canvas2d render performance usually does't sounds efficient.
But if you use WebGL, that maybe quite difference. even though I am not family with WebGL, I do knew that maybe more efficient. Dirty-Check should be a good Choice to match your propose.