programmatically create Background Images in Flex 3 - actionscript-3

I'm developing a visualization for certain parts of a Warehouse with Flex 3. In this visualization there are lot of blocks where 1 to x pallets can be placed where x is between 9 and 15. I need to represent each pallet with a black square, each place which is already assigned to a pallet but not physically taken with a grey square and each free place with a white square. I first thought to just use a canvas for each place on a block and change their color if the state changes. But the hundreds of canvases which are there as a result of this approach are not updated quickly enough for my purposes (screen freezes for a few seconds).
I don't want to use embedded images because of the great amount of images I had to embed in the application (those Images appear in 4 orientations).
My idea was to create background images which reflect the state of the whole block only when needed for that certain state and cache them, so that the computation time is spread over the whole runtime.
My problem now is I don't know how to create them in a way that I can use them as "backgroundImages". As far as I understand I would need them as a class object but I don't know how to achieve that, when not embedding the images.
I'm of course open to better approaches to solve my problem. Thanks for your support.

I would suggest using Graphics property of a Sprite for example. It provides basic drawing API, like drawing lines, circles and rectangles.
Besides, you can draw bitmap images on the Graphics to produce more advances results.

Related

Drawing shapes versus rendering images?

I am using Pygame 1.9.2a with Python 2.7 for designing an experiment and have been so far using Pygame only on a need basis and am not familiar with all Pygame classes or concepts (Sprites, for instance, I have no idea about).
I am required to draw many (45 - 50 at one time) shapes on the screen at different locations to create a crowded display. The shapes vary from displaced Ts , displaced Ls to line intersections. [ Like _| or † or ‡ etc.]! I'm sorry that I am not able to post an image of this because I apparently do not have a reputation of 10, which is necessary to post images.
I also need these shapes in 8 different orientations. I was initially contemplating generating point lists and using these to draw lines. But, for a single shape, I will need four points and I need 50 of these shapes. Again, I'm not sure how to rotate these once drawn. Can I use the Pygame Transform or something? I think they can be used, say on Rects. Or will I have to generate points for the different orientations too, so that when drawn, they come out looking rotated, that is, in the desired orientation?
The alternative I was thinking of was to generate images for the shapes in GIMP or some software like that. But, for any screen, I will have to load around 50 images. Will I have to use Pygame Image and make 50 calls for something like this? Or is there an easier way to handle multiple images?
Also, which method would be a bigger hit to performance? Since, it is an experiment, I am worried about timing precision too. I don't know if there is a different way to generate shapes in Pygame. Please help me decide which of these two (or a different method) is better to use for my purposes.
Thank you!
It is easer to use pygame.draw.rect() or pygame.draw.polygon() (because you don't need to know how to use GIMP or InkScape :) ) but you have to draw it on another pygame.Surface() (to get bitmap) and than you can rotate it, add alpha (to make transparet) and than you can put it on screen.
You can create function to generate images (using Surface()) with all shapes in different orientations at program start. If you will need better looking images you can change function to load images created in GIMP.
Try every method on your own - this is the best method to check which one is good for you.
By the way: you can save generated images pygame.image.save() and then load it. You can have all elements on one image and use part of image Surface.get_clip()

How to remove graphic from scanned document before passing it to tesserract for OCRing?

I'm working on OCR project but I don't know how to remove graphics from the scanned document image before passing it to tesserract.
Some scanned documents which I want to remove graphics are below:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/hvmpty2z3cw3vao/IMG_0087.JPG
http://www.mediafire.com/view/1sgy5s2aaj2o8y3/IMG_0086.JPG
Any advice is very appreciate. Many thanks.
As the text area is usually sparse and does not connect each other, you may consider to have a sobel edge detection on the original image and detect the biggest connection area with some threshold to detect the image area.
Meanwhile, as the image is a rectangle area, another way is to have a Hough translation to detect straight line to consist a rectangle with 4 lines. If you go this way, it’s recommended that you zoom the image first to reduce the calculate complexity.
You can start by detecting text areas using an algorithm available in AForge.Net. See HorizontalRunLengthSmoothing and VerticalRunLengthSmoothing. The algorithm is not very complicated and you can implement easily it using your favorite image processing library. The only constraint is to know approximately the size of the characters in your images.

Achieving cyclic tile behavior with Flip tile.

Currently I implemented my Flip Tile with the help of Scheduled Task, So one issue with similar approach is the Flip tile will flip the same image during the time interval. So what I am trying to achieve is I need to flip my images like cyclic tile. Ie one after another manner. One thing to notice here is I am using local (Isolated storage) images as Tile images not remote uri’s. Is it possible to achieve similar implementation in windows phone 8.
If you want to get the behaviour of the CycleTemplate then this is not possible with the FlipTemplate.
If you are trying to achieve having tiles which include a combination of images and text (set as Content in the FlipTemplate) then a solution would be to generate an image which includes the text you're interested in and then use that image, along with any other, in the CycleTemplate.

How to properly clear all images that were "blitted" onscreen using pygame?

I was wondering how does pygame.blit manages the images blitted on screen. When I blit an multiple images on the screen, I see that each image is stacked on top the previous one.
How do I clear all these images? Wouldn't(somehow) there be a big problem when there are LOTS of images stacking on top of each other on the screen? Currently, I'm just blitting a white bg or custom bg on the whole screen to "clear" the screen. So far no problems or anything since the app I am working on is very small.
When you blit an image to a surface, it basicly draws it on the surface. The location of the blitting or the object blitted is not saved and cannot be changed. It's like if you were painting the images onto a canvas. The new ones would go over the old ones and there would be no way to get rid of one image if it were colliding with another image.
The most common approach to solving this is to just completly clear the screen using surface.fill(), and redraw the images each frame.
To answer your question about if there woudl be problems when there are lots of images, no. The window will only be saved as each individual pixel being a certain color, much like a regular picture you would take a camera, so no matter how many objects you blit, the game will always take the same amount of time.
There are multiple approaches:
Clean the whole background, as you are doing.
If the computer keeps up with the fps, perhaps it's better to leave it like this.
Clean only the areas where you blitted objects (see pygame.sprite.RenderUpdates)
In your case, if you have many stacked objects, perhaps it's better to write your own solution, trying to find the union between colliding rectangles, to avoid reblitting the same background over and over.

Howto dynamically render space background in actionscript3?

I'm creating a space game in actionscript/flex 3 (flash). The world is infinitely big, because there are no maps. For this to work I need to dynamically (programatically) render the background, which has to look like open space.
To make the world feel real and to make certain places look different than others, I must be able to add filters such as colour differences and maybe even a misty kind of transformation - these would then be randomly added and changed.
The player is able to "scroll" the "map" by flying to the sides of the screen, so that a certain part of the world is only visible at once but the player is able to go anywhere. The scrolling works by moving all objects except for the player in the opposite direction, making it look like it was the player that moved into that direction. The background also needs to be moved, but has to be different on the new discovered terrain (dynamically created).
Now my question is how I would do something like this, what kind of things do I need to use and how do I implement them? Performance also needs to be taken into account, as many more objects will be in the game.
You should only have views for objects that are within the visible area. You might want to use a quad tree for that.
The background should maybe be composed of a set of tiles, that you can repeat more or less randomly (do you really need a background, actually? wouldn't having some particles be enough?). Use the same technique here you use for the objects.
So in the end, you wind up having a model for objects and tiles or particles (that you would generate in the beginning). This way, you will only add a few floats (you can achieve additional performance, if you do not calculate positions of objects, that are FAR away. The quad tree should help you with that, but I think this shouldn't be necessary) If an object having a view leaves the stage, free the view, and use the quad tree to check, if new objects appear.
If you use a lot of objects/particles, consider using an object pool. If objects only move, and are not rotated/scaled, consider using DisplayObject::cacheAsBitmap.