Develop Reference

Simple way to put graphic on the screen in android

I've been looking around for a simple way to put graphic on the screen in android for a while now and I'm really confused.
I've a simple game written in java with swing for graphics and that's all I really need as the graphics doesn't really matter in this project.
Now we want to rewrite it so it works on devices with android and honestly I can't find a simple way to just put a image on the screen.
I'd love to avoid using complex game engine because I just don't need it. All I want is a possibility to draw an image (or 50 images) on x,y given by me and refreshing a screen every 100 milliseconds and I thought I'd be the first thing I'd learn in any android tutorial but well... it's not. Of course I know how to draw an Image with .xml but I need something more automatic - for dozens of images changing all the time.
So what is the best to do this? Isn't there really any way to do it with just some android built in function? If not what engine should I use just for the simplest things I mentioned?

A simple but not necessarily very clean way to do this would be to create an xml layout that is just an empty RelativeLayout.
Then you could create your images like this:
ImageView image = new ImageView(this);
image.setLayoutParams(new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(IMAGE_WIDTH,IMAGE_HEIGHT));
//Other setup code for your image goes here
myRelativeLayout.addView(image);
This should give you an image of the specified width and height that sits at the origin.
Then you could move the image into position like this:
image.setX(IMAGE_X_POS);
image.setY(IMAGE_Y_POS);
When to do the moving is up to you as it will depend on when you know the positions that need to be moved to.

How to recognize/identify different types of objects (textfields, labels, buttons etc) on screen/ from screenshots?

I would like to make something that is able to recognize different objects on the screen. Lets say I take a screenshot on a window with textfields, labels and buttons. I would like to pass in the image and it should be able to distinguish one from the other. In other words, it should put the name 'textfield' on top of the position where the textfields are located, 'button' on top of buttons and 'label' on top of labels.
Here is a sample image from the internet, to visualize a 'registration window': http://kb.parallels.com/Attachments/12828/Images/registration1.jpg
I would like to do this in Java, but I'm unsure if this is even possible. Does anyone have any ideas where I should start looking? Edge detection? Feature detection? OCR/ICR?
Does this already exist? Anyone ever come across something like this before?
Could someone please point me to the right direction? I would highly appreciate it.
Thank you! :)

This is how I would work on it:
A) Identification/Segmentation. Without knowing your data, you might be fine with something like "Find a rectangle (or something close to it, since edges are rounded) of less than half of your windows' area" (depends on your data..).
B) Classification. Personally, I'd scale every object you found to size 100*100 (or, whatever) and compare it with sample data (yes, you can scale a mini checkbox to that size. It won't look pretty, but it doesn't matter how it looks like..). Either "brute force" (which is why I scaled) or some nice classification algorithm. (Don't use neural networks, go SVM or nearest neighbour). For classification, I'd mostly look at histograms and shape factors/moments inside the rectangle. If the text confuses the data, get rid of it with some morphology before classification.
Textfields are a bit tricky, but for that, I'd use some OCR library and look at the entire picture. (Personally, I've done well with IMAQ, but it's commercial). If the text is outside a box, you've got yourself a label.
You should probably look into OpenCV.

Best way to render and update an image each frame?

What is the best way to edit singular pixels of an texture multiple times per frame? I have tried using a couple ways to no avail. What is the most optimal way to do this? I have tried using Intermediate mode and drawing each quad, thought, this is really slow.
Edit:
I forgot to mention that I am doing an unusual "fog of war" system. This system doesn't let you see around walls but instead acts like a 2D ray traced shadow. I want these shadows to be pixelated as this is part of the style of the game. I am trying to find the best way to do a form of a shadow map that I can overlay over the world to show what you can see.

I recommend using a Pixel Buffer Object.

Game Development, strange image effect while moving camera

I'm developing Side Scroll 2D Game, using AndEngine
I'm using their SVG extension (I'm using vector graphic)
But I discovered strange and ugly effect, while moving my player (while camera is chasing player exactly, means while camera is changing its position)
Images of my sprites looks just different, they are like blurred or there is effect like those images would be moving (not changing their possition, just jittery effect, really hard to explain and call this effect properly) Hopefully this image may explain it a bit:
Its more or less, how does it look in the game, where:
a) "FIRST" image is showing square, while player is moving (CAMERA isn't) image looks as it should
b) "SECOND" the same image, but with this strange effect "which looks like image moving/blurring during camera moving [chasing player])
Friend of mine told me that it might be hardware problem:
"the blurring that you notice is actually a hardware problem. Some phones "smooth" the content on the screen to give a nicer feel to applications. I don't know if it's the screen or the graphics processor, but it doesn't occur on my wife's Samsung Captivate. It happens on my Atrix and Xoom though. It's really noticable on the Xoom due to the large screen size."
But seems there is way to prevent it, since I have tested many similar games, where camera is chasing player, and I could not notice such effect.
Is there a way to turn this off in code?
I'm grateful for previous answers, unfortunately, still problem exist.
Till now, I have tried:
casting (int) on setCenter method which is being executed on updateChaseEntity
testing game using PNG images, instead of SVG extension and vector graphic
different TextureOptions
hardwareAcceleration
If someone have different idea, what may cause this strange effect, I would be really grateful for help - thank you.

Some devices (Xperia Play) bleed everywhere when trying to draw things that are moving quickly. For example a red icon on the application list leaves a blur behind it. You could try hardwareAcceleration in the manifest (on and off) to see if it makes a difference.
You'd probably get the same effect if you weren't using svg

When your player's just going to the right and camera begins chasing him, all other sprites except player are moving to the left. Try to print the absolute coordinates of your "blurring" sprite (or some of its anchor points) to the log. The X-coord of sprite should be decreasing linearly. If you notice it's increasing some times, it could be a reason of blur.
Hope this will help.

It sounds like it's due to the camera moving in real increments, making the SVG components rest on non-integer bounds, and the SVG renderer making anti-aliasing come into effect to demonstrate this. Try moving the camera in integer increments by casting camera values to int.

I'm not familiar with this engine but I wonder why would you use vector graphics for pixelated art style. I'll be surprised if your character in the screenshot is really a vector art... maybe it's texture imported in SVG? I attempted back in the day to use flash a few times and I was making the same mistake... I'm not saying it's not possible but it's not intended to create pixel art with flash or any other vector software. There is a reason why most flash games have similar look.

Best way to debug it, is try a different looking sprite.
Maybe it is just the slow response time of your device display.
I'm also an Andengine developer, and never seen such behavior.
Sometimes you fix jittering using FixedStepEngine, it might help.
If you can post your code maybe we can better help you.

Android fuzzy / faded fonts possible?

So I am developing a very simple app, mostly for personal use, am am looking for a simple solution to a simple problem.
In its simplest form I am looking for a way to have a line of text with just one or two words blurred out. Basically I am looking to blur text beyond readability but still hinting at what is hidden. Kind of a knowledge / memory app to help memorize some definitions by prompting with a few key words.
I am having issues finding a simple way to accomplish this. Am I just missing an attribute to blur text?
I have thought about:
overriding say the textview onDraw but that seems overkill and I am unsure if there are any methods available to easily blur text.
using the toHtml and trying out the new CSS3 blur effects but I don't think that that is a reasonable solution and I am not sure that the Android platform supports all the CSS3 format, if any.
the simplest and most desirable solution in my book was to find a font (ttf, off, etc) file, derived from a common font, that is already blurred as I described, and use that alternating with the non blurred version of that font to achieve the desired effect.
make the described font but that just plain requires too much time on my part and the outcome is not necessarily good :)
I have thought about some alternative ways to simulate this effect but they all result in fading the text, which is undesirable, since I want to have some visual prompts to indicate the obscured texts length.
Any ideas? It's been years since I have developed in Java and I am unsure what is available and what the Android OS supports.

I haven't looked into using these properties for only part of the text, but TextView has some possibly useful properties related to text shadows. Using something like the following XML attributes, you could hide the actual text and just show a blurred shadow.
android:textColor - #0000 (fully transparent so that the crisp text is not shown)
android:shadowColor - #FFFF (or whatever color you want to appear)
android:shadowDx - 0 (the shadow is in the same horizontal position as the text)
android:shadowDy - 0 (the shadow is in the same vertical position as the text)
android:shadowRadius - Depends on how much you want to blur. A very small non-zero value, such as 0.001, will be sharp. Larger values blur more, and at some point the shadow becomes illegible.