So basically I am building a GUI type interface for my website that needs to have multiple requirements.
Image to interact with i.e draw straight lines on it, curved lines, circles etc (different color lines too)
The image will need to have the option to "save" the current state and access it later
The image will have different objects on it that will have different "states" i.e active or not active etc.
What is the best way to accomplish this? I have looked into GUI builder and Canvas for HTML5 but have not found a solid guide to satisfy my needs. Any further assistance will be much appreciated!
You should be able to do that with the 2dContext provided by the canvas. This url gives you a list of all the methods
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/CanvasRenderingContext2D
That gives you options to draw circles, rectangles etc and you can set up click events and hit tests on those objects.
You can also save the canvas output to an image or an array.
Related
I am trying to draw circles (representing people) on a PNG map of Earth. Obviously, I don't want people to be floating in the oceans as the simulated civilization expands. How would I create specified areas on the map that I can draw on? Can I simply restrict the background of the PNG?
I tried using the clip() method, but it still allowed spawning within the oceans. Any suggestions (or if you recommend clip(), how would you use it in this case) would be appreciated.
You somehow have to tell your program where drawing is allowed and where not. There are a bunch of approaches to this:
Try to define a set of features on your PNG image and only spawn (or don't spawn) civilizations if these features are met.
Make a "map" out of your map. Define areas on your PNG image where spawning is allowed and where spawning is not allowed. You can use this using the Polygon class for example.
Make a second PNG image in which you make all oceans purely transparent. Then, only spawn civilizations on the original image at locations where the image with transparency is non-transparent.
Just a bunch of ideas.
I'm having quite a bit of difficulty wrapping my head around the actual display side of things with libgdx. That is, it just seems fairly jumbled in terms of what needs to be done in order to actually put something up onto the screen. I guess my confusion can sort of be separated into two parts:
What exactly needs to be done in terms of creating an image? There's
Texture, TextureRegion, TextureAtlas, Sprite, Batch, and probably a
few other art related assets that I'm missing. How do these all
relate and tie into each other? What's the "production chain" among
these I guess would be a way of putting it.
In terms of putting
whatever is created from the stuff above onto the monitor or
display, how do the different coordinate and sizing measures relate
and translate to and from each other? Say there's some image X that
I want to put on the screen. IT's got it's own set of dimensions and
coordinates, but then there's also a viewport size (is there a
viewport position?) and a camera position (is there a camera size?).
On top of all that, there's also the overall dispaly size that's
from Gdx.graphics. A few examples of things I might want to do could
be as follow:
X is my "global map" that is bigger than my screen
size. I want to be able to scroll/pan across it. What are the
coordinates/positions I should use when displaying it?
Y is bigger
than my screen size. I want to scale it down and have it always be
in the center of the screen/display. What scaling factor do I use
here, and which coordinates/positions?
Z is smaller than my screen
size. I want to stick it in the upper left corner of my screen and
have it "stick" to the global map I mentioned earlier. Which
positioning system do I use?
Sorry if that was a bunch of stuff... I guess the tl;dr of that second part is just which set of positions/coordinates, sizes, and scales am I supposed to do everything in terms of?
I know this might be a lot to ask at once, and I also know that most of this stuff can be found online, but after sifting through tutorial after tutorial, I can't seem to get a straight answer as to how these things all relate to each other. Any help would be appreciated.
Texture is essentially the raw image data.
TextureRegion allows you to grab smaller areas from a larger texture. For example, it is common practice to pack all of the images for your game/app into a single large texture (the LibGDX “TexturePacker” is a separate program that does this) and then use regions of the larger texture for your individual graphics. This is done because switching textures is a heavy and slow operation and you want to minimize this process.
When you pack your images into a single large image with the TexturePacker it creates a “.atlas” file which stores the names and locations of your individual images. TextureAtlas allows you to load the .atlas file and then extract your original images to use in your program.
Sprite adds position and color capabilities to the texture. Notice that the Texture API has no methods for setting/getting position or color. Sprites will be your characters and other objects that you can actually move around and position on the screen.
Batch/SpriteBatch is an efficient way of drawing multiple sprites to the screen. Instead of making drawing calls for each sprite one at a time the Batch does multiple drawing calls at once.
And hopefully I’m not adding to the confusion, but another I option I really like is using the “Actor” and “Stage” classes over the “Sprite” and “SpriteBatch” classes. Actor is similar to Sprite but adds additional functionality for moving/animating, via the act method. The Stage replaces the SpriteBatch as it uses its own internal SpriteBatch so you do not need to use the SpriteBatch explicitly.
There is also an entire set of UI components (table, button, textfield, slider, progress bar, etc) which are all based off of Actor and work with the Stage.
I can’t really help with question 2. I stick to UI-based apps, so I don’t know the best practices for working with large game worlds. But hopefully someone more knowledgeable in that area can help you with that.
This was to long to reply as a comment so I’m responding as another answer...
I think both Sprite/SpriteBatch and Actor/Stage are equally powerful as you can still animate and move with Sprite/SpriteBatch, but Actor/Stage is easier to work with. The stage has two methods called “act” and “draw” which allows the stage to update and draw every actor it contains very easily. You override the act method for each of your actors to specify what kind of action you want it to do. Look up a few different tutorials for Stage/Actor with sample code and it should become clear how to use it.
Also, I was slightly incorrect before that “Actor” is equivalent to Sprite, because Sprite includes a texture, but Actor by itself does not have any kind of graphical component. There is an extension of Actor called “Image” that includes a Drawable, so the Image class is actually the equivalent to Sprite. Actor is the base class that provides the methods for acting (or “updating”), but it doesn’t have to be graphical. I've used Actors for other purposes such as triggering audio sounds at specific times.
Atlas creates the large Texture containing all of your png files and then allows you to get regions from it for individual png's. So the pipeline for getting a specific png graphic would be Atlas > Region > Sprite/Image. Both Image and Sprite classes have constructors that take a region.
Actually, my work is based on displaying a diagram in the screen, and while zooming in/out, the information in the diagram becomes more/less (just like Google Map).
May anyone guide to a 2D Graphics API that can allow me zoom in/out my drawings in Java easily?
I have used Graphics2D with AffineTransform, but showing more/less details in the diagram is somehow difficult using these stuff. I actually mean that Java Graphics API does not help in showing more/less details, positioning them, changing their size, etc. I have to write code for everything and every change in my design requires too much effort to modify my code.
You should use the MVC pattern where the diagram class representing the diagram with all the details is your model, the displayed image is your view and the zoom buttons/wheel are your controllers.
Here are some quick ideas:
You could have some method that builds the rendered image always using the same "internal" size, with more or less details depending on the zoom required and then use the AffineTransform to enlarge it (which is the easiest way to zoom an image as far as I know). Each time the zoom is changed this method is invoked passing the new zoom and the image is rebuilt.
If this is not feasible (e.g. because the coordinates of the additional information are not easy to compute on a small image) you can try the other way round: first build the basic image, enlarge it, then use the method to incrementally add new informations to this image. You can even cache the images built from smaller zoom values to speed up the process.
I am a C/C++ programmer trying my hand at Java for the first time. I'm currently working on a program that reads in a bunch of data and builds a map. I want to give the user the option to toggle various features of the map using check boxes.
In the Win32 API, I was able to accomplish this by pre-building the features on transparent bitmaps and then BitBlt()ing them over top one another. Does Java Swing support something similar? I imagine I'm not the only person who has ever wanted to do this. Building the features is relatively slow, so I only want to generate the layers once and then block copy them to the JPanel I'm using as a display.
Thanks in advance!
You could dynamically create BufferedImage objects, with alpha channels, then only paint this on a frame if the checkbox is checked.
You can store images in Swing using the BufferedImage class, and then use that to later draw the final image.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/image/BufferedImage.html
The final image can later be painted on to the JPanel (probably by overriding the JPanel's paintComponent method) by using the alpha values of the images.
I'm trying to develop a 2D game to android using opengl.
I know how to print images on the screen and animate them. But in my game I have a map and a want to zoom in and out and scroll the map. But I can't figure out the best way of doing it.
Can anybody help me?
I don't have any api examples but I did games design at college so I'll give my two bits.
The method you use will depend on your map style, size, functionality and format.
For example if you are looking for a very static non changing map, use a simple picture image. You can use the API frame for a picture view, enabling you to zoom in and out as you do in the gallery and to scroll on zoomed images, or in this case, zoom locations on your map.
Alternatively, if your map is based off a tiling system, a good example of this is the original Pokémon and Legend of Zelda games from the old game boy, then each area stores a tile 'thumbnail' for itself as a bitmap. These are then put into their appropriate locations on a grid depending on what areas are discovered.
This is the probably the most flexible way to build your map as you are not relying on a set bitmap for the entirety your map meaning it can change its look efficiently; you can build it as desired to show areas of choice (useful for if the map only reveals places the gamer has covered) and it also means you can do tile based overlay:
ie - if a certain area should contain treasure, theres a treasure icon overlayed on that tiles x,y position on the map grid.
I used the tiling option in my game projects from college and it made everything else map related easier. It also made the map side of things smaller storage wise.
The simplest approach would be to just call glTranslatef(-scrollX,-scrollY,0) followed by glScalef(zoom,zoom,zoom) before you render your map.