Playing short animation xCode iPhone - iphone

thanks for all your advice I took out of this forum over the last weeks.
Now I've a problem where I would need your help:
I want to show a series of short animations (5 animations, 10 sec each) on the iPhone. The animation would loop but the code will decide if the current loop is repeated or another loop will be started (Laughing face, shouting face, crying face etc.).
I am a little concerned that if I would design this animation with single images to be played the size of the app would explode. So video came to my mind. On the other hand we need to overlay the animation with changing images, so video could be a kind of hassle.
Any ideas about the best way to go?
Thanx for all your advice.
Tom

For 5 animations of 10 seconds each, i would suggest using single images. And you can use UIImageView's inbuilt animation with repeat count. It will be very easy to code.
Only make sure not to use [UIImage imageNamed:#""] while creating image arrays as you might have many images. This method creates an autorelease object and you wouldn't want many such objects hanging around in your app.

Related

Game Timers Slowing Down Overall Performance

I'm working on an iPhone App where I rely heavily on timers and animations, but I've realized my game is really slowing down and lagging on certain aspects of the game. I'm not quite sure how to improve this without removing any animations or anything.
Essentially what I'm using is the accelerometer to update my character's position (Left/Right). I also use several timers to read from different URLs, update images and the one that lags the most is one that loops an image to move from left to right.
Basically I'm using about 6 or 7 timers and the Accelerometer, is there a way I can improve the performance of my game without having to remove any of my animations or changing the interval of the timers?
Thanks in advance!
Try use Allocation
RUN-> RUN WITH PERFORMANCE TOOLS->Allocation
to see which part is overload in the application
Instead of using NSTimer to animate, you might want to look at using the animationImages property in UIImageView (which lets you show multiple frames of animation, possibly looping) or beginAnimations within UIView (which lets you move an object along a path, among other things).
A good place to start is with this question on recommend reading for iPhone animation, although for reference the documentation in XCode and Apple's programming guides are good sources by themselves.
What others have suggested - in terms of using a game loop - make sense, too, but depending on the complexity of your game, sometimes just letting the iOS SDK take care of your animations for you can be good enough.

Iphone App Similar to the Talking Larry Application

I am developing iphone application similar to the Talking Larry Application. I am facing an issue of Low Memory when i pre-load the animations into an NSMutable Array. If i do not pre-load the animations and load it into the Animation Images when the user touch the button then it takes Time and it play back the animation very Slow. And during video making it does not play the complete animations. How can i resolve this issue. I want to play back the animations similar to the Talking Larry app and do not want to get Low Memory Issue.
You have to “juggle” the images, freeing those that are not needed and preload those that will be needed soon. The trick is probably preloading a decent number of images beforehand, so that the animation does not slow down when started. You have to experiment to get the right numbers.
And of course, it also depends on the image resolution. I don’t know Talking Larry, but if you are trying to animate full-resolution retina images, it might be too much for the machine.

iPhone Smooth Transition from One Video To Another

I have to figure out the best way to transition from one video to the next
BASIC IDEA: An example would be that there is a video of a person walking.....the user taps the video and a seamless transition occurs to a video of a person running (over simplified example)
My first thought was to create 2 movie players and use transitions between the 2 view elements. But movie-player doesn't support that.
stopping the current video, loading new content, and then starting it is a solution but not very elegant. We are making a interactive sales tool for our reps and we want this to look as professional as possible.
CURRENT THOUGHT: If there was some sample code for AVPlayer, it would seem I could use AVVideoComposition to switch between videos? But details on how that might happen don't seem to be currently available.
POSSIBLE CLUE: I figured this would be easy as I bought an app called Live Cams HD that shows 16 different video feeds at once.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Steve, the short answer is that you are not going to be able to get the kind of results you want using AVPlayer. The h.264 video logic included in iOS is really great at playing video and video/audio together, but it really sucks at starting/stopping and switching from one clip to another. The reason is that there is a lot of buffering that needs to happen to load up and start playing a h.264 video in hardware. Basically, you need to roll your own code that sets UIImage/CGImageRef for your views in a way that makes it easy to switch from one clip to another by simply switching from one array of UIImage objects to another. Of course, that is easy to say yet not so easy to implement.
What I would suggest is that you evaluate existing code that already implements this logic instead of rolling your own. For example, have a look at this StreetFighter demo app. It shows how a very simple game like iPhone UI can be constructed using a series of clips that show a character doing a kick, a punch, or throwing a fireball. The results looks like this:
I also wrote up a blog post about seamless-video-looping-on-ios. You can of course roll your own code to do all this, but I would suggest reading more about my library at the linked website as it will save you a lot of time.
After the first video has played every frame except the last one, you quickly swap to a view with an image of the last frame (basically the last frame) and then you transition into a view with the an image of the first frame of the next video and start up that one.
Or you could create a animation with all your frames (programming your videos), that will make it customizable, but the quality will probably not be as good and the cpu usage can spike, so you will have to make a call on that one.

Making fire effect on iPhone

I'll describe ways that I already know, and can do, and want to hear another suggestions, or may be even solutions :)
Create N frames of fire with semi-transparent pictures (PNGs)
Like at this site
Create pixel-based fire - line by line with shifting up. (not the best way I think)
Like here
Any other solutions?
Mr.doob's fire effect in flash is very clever.
Particles Fire Prototype by Nicolas Goles
Chapter 7 of iPhone Games Projects begins with a discussion of fire effects.
A movie with the fire animation playing, or maybe an animated .gif image.

Image sequence animation with Core Animation

I'm currently using a UIImageView with an array of images to create a small looping animation sequence with about 20 images in there (at 320x480). Whilst this works okay for 20 - 30 images, any more and the app quits on the iphone. There is nothing else in my test app at the moment so I know it's just down to the animationImages sequence.
Has anyone come across any samples of doing this type of thing through Core Animation to achieve better performance and allow many more images? From what I've read it sounds like its possible to set up a ton of CALayers and put an image in each, and then create the animation by manipulating the layers on and off in sequence. Is this a good way to do it?
Or, alternatively, as I'm basically after the effect of a looping movie, is there a way to use the moviecontroller to achieve the effect without it fading in and out at the start and at the end?
I'd be grateful for any pointers. Many thanks.
This could be a simple memory issue. 20 images (320x480) is about 3 MB of memory, assuming 8bpp (if they're higher color, obviously even more). You might try loading and unloading as needed (though, of course, that'll mean rolling your own animation, rather than using UIImageView).
Sounds like a simple memory issue.
You could load one or two frames at a time, or actually play a movie instead.