efficient android rendering
- by llll
I've read quite a few tutorials on game programming on android,
and all of them provide basically the same solution as to drawing the game, that is having a dedicated thread spinning like this:
public void run() {
while(true) {
if(!surfaceHolder.getSurface().isValid()) continue;
Canvas canvas = surfaceHolder.lockCanvas();
drawGame(canvas); /* do actual drawing here */
surfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
}
now I'm wondering, isn't this wasteful? Suppose I've a game with very simple graphics, so that the actual time in drawGame is little;
then I'm going to draw the same things on and on, stealing cpu from the other threads;
a possibility could be skipping the drawing and sleeping a bit if the game state hasn't changed,
which I could check by having the state update thread mantaining a suitable status flag.
But maybe there are other options. For example, couldn'it be possible to synchronize with rendering,
so that I don't post updates too often? Or am I missing something and that is precisely what lockCanvas does,
that is it blocks and burns no cpu until proper time?
Thanks in advance
L.
