Category Archives: Java

One of the biggest problem I had when converting Snorms from PC to Android was memory management. Memory on Android is quite limited, usually you have around 32mb heap size available, and garbage collector is your worst enemy. Combining these two things might be quite tricky, even more if the game was first built for PC where memory and minor garbage collector are not a big issue. I’ll try to explain in this small article what I did technically to get around this problem. Environment The best thing to do is of course to run the application directly on Android and use appropriate tools, but I am used to PC tools and it’s a lot easier to just launch my game from eclipse than sending it to Android (or Android simulator). So In order to have an environment similar to Android you need to adjust...

Great news everyone ! I finally have some time to speak about programming ^^ So I will talk about a replacement for Java 2D graphics I made for my engine: GraphicsRenderer. Introduction I made a replacement for Java2D graphics object a while ago as I thought it was missing some functionalities, and I was wondering if I could get something quicker, without using lwjgl. I did not want to use lwjgl because I wanted my game to work on an applet, without security warnings, so I wanted a pure java solution. Now that Snorms is a downloadable game, I don’t care about that anymore, but I am still using it as it’s working quite well. Maybe I’ll change that in the future, I don’t know… Some of the things I did not like about Java2D: It is quite slow when displaying hundreds of images Applying...

I always had problems playing sound with Java, at the moment I use standard Java sound, with the following limitations : Under Linux there is a crackling sound, with both OpenJDK or Oracle JVM, I can’t figure out why and how to remove it (tried it on two computers, same problems) Under Windows, when changing volume, the sound becomes awful (crackling a lot), I just used the standard way to do it ‘line.getControl(FloatControl.Type.MASTER_GAIN)’, it does that on every computer I tried. Can’t figure out why… Under Linux (I just tested OpenJDK), changing volume randomly crashes, maybe it’s crackling more when it works, not sure… When trying to manually change gain (directly modifying source data), it seems the sound output is automatically adjusted. Meaning that even if I reduce volume on source data, the sound will be played full volume, losing bits of information… The result...

After 2 weeks working with Java2d, here are some little tricks to help optimize your code Don’t create too many intermediate Graphics Creating a Graphics is quite long, and usually it’s not the good way to do stuff. You should try to think all your rendering process with the less Graphics object creation (getGraphics, createGraphics,…), if you can just use the one given by the paint method (or the one from your double buffering system), and pass it as argument in all your rendering functions to directly draw on it. Try to stick to environment image format If the display image format is not the same as your application, rendering can be very slow, usually to create an image you should just use the createCompatibleImage function public static BufferedImage createCompatibleImage(int width, int height, boolean transparent) { GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment(); GraphicsDevice gd = ge.getDefaultScreenDevice(); GraphicsConfiguration...