Thanks for the response. Side scrolling is a very commonly used game engine and I believe that the platform needs better examples of this. Obviously other graphic engines are needed too, e.g. OpenGL - but I think getting good performance out of 2d graphics will be a very good start for many games.
Compare the smooth scrolling in GridViews with say the scrolling in a paid game like deBlob (very jerky - see for yourselves) to see what I mean. You mention games should not be using views at all. I have tried views, surface views and the like - nothing seems to provide smooth scrolling. I am even thinking of putting my game engine in a ListView / GridView just because I know the scrolling is smoother (!), but this seems fairly ridiculous, there must be a better way to do it. Please could you provide a better example - all I need is a way to very smoothly scroll an oversized bitmap either horizontally or vertically. Your help on this would certainly be very valuable to me and all game developers for the platform. On Mar 30, 9:58 am, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote: > There is no magic in GridView and ListView. In fact there is really > anti-magic -- these are not designed in any way to operate like one would do > things in a game. The only thing they do at all special is take advantage > of tricky features of the view hierarchy to be able to scroll their views > efficiently... but if you are doing a game, hopefully you aren't doing much > of anything with views at all, so what they do won't be of any interest to > you. > > One thing I'd like to understand -- you seem very focused on side-scrolling, > but are you concerned that -no- Android games to smooth animation, or just > side-scrolling ones but there are others that do? Because if the latter, > there is really nothing special about side-scrolling, and the common > approach for these will generally be to have a SurfaceView in which you do > 2d or OpenGL rendering. > > On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 1:36 AM, admin.androidsl...@googlemail.com < > > > > admin.androidsl...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > Many of you will have read or contributed to the very long thread I > > started a week ago on '[android-developers] Re: Anything on Android > > that can do smooth scrolling?' > > > That was a very useful discussion between devs and engineers on > > whether additional performance could be made available to fast-moving > > games by lowering priority or disabling other background threads. > > > However, I wanted to create a separate thread to discuss what can be > > done TODAY in existing games to solve this problem. > > > Why is it a problem? Because there is not a single game in Android > > Market that features smooth scrolling backgrounds. Games may not be > > the only app needed, but they certainly need to be visually impressive > > for the platform to survive. > > > Why do I think there is a solution today? Because all components using > > GridView and ListView in most cases feature very smooth scrolling - if > > you don't believe me, go to the thumbnail scrolling view in the native > > picture viewer. > > > So what I am saying is there is some magic in the GridView / ListView > > code which allows for smooth scrolling which games on Android platform > > desperately need. Despite going through the source code extensively I > > cannot discover what is needed to apply this to a game engine. > > > Please could someone with a good low-level knowledge of the GridView > > and ListView API's please please please provide a very simple demo of > > how this smooth scrolling could be applied to scrolling an oversized > > image either horizontally or vertically. > > > Otherwise developers are all going to try and most likely fail to > > figure this out themselves. Believe me I have spent many hours on this > > looking at Android source code, surfaceviews, onDraw, dispatchDraw, > > memory allocation, and nothing so far has given me anything close to > > smooth scrolling. > > > And I also know game developers are competing with each other and want > > to guard their tricks of the trade. But ultimately, we are ALL > > competing with rival mobile platforms and unless this issue can be > > resolved, all android game developers will lose out. > > > And the whole platform loses because there will be no quality games. > > Why shouldn't our games look like this after all : > >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4795KVt_kw > > -- > Dianne Hackborn > Android framework engineer > hack...@android.com > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > provide private support. All such questions should be posted on public > forums, where I and others can see and answer them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
