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  • Mysql maven jpa skeleton

    - by coubeatczech
    Hi, is there a skeleton for a project using mysql, some eclipse/top link with RESOURCE_LOCAL as connection type? Preferably using maven. I'm searching for it for hours and can't get running even the sipmlest exaple. So if you had it ready and running, please, post :-). Even something as simple as these two classes only. @Entity public class Message implements Serializable{ public Message() {} public Message(String s){ this.s = s; } @Id String s; public String getS(){ return s; } } public class App { static private EntityManagerFactory emf; static private EntityManager em; public static void main( String[] args ) { emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("persistence"); em = emf.createEntityManager(); Message m = new Message("abc"); em.persist(m); } }

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • Android AnimationDrawable and knowing when animation ends

    - by LostDroid
    I want to do an animation with several image-files, and for this the AnimationDrawable works very well. However, I need to know when the animation starts and when it ends (i.e add a listener like the Animation.AnimationListener). After having searched for answers, I'm having a bad feeling the AnimationDrawable does not support listeners.. Does anyone know how to do frame-by-frame image animation on Android?

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  • iPhone - UIView Animation on UIButton - button unclickable for portion of duration.

    - by Robert
    I am trying to have a button move around the screen and still be clickable. I have it moving around the screen correctly, but the odd thing is that I can't click the button until the final second of the animation. The button is still moving and yet after a certain threshold I can click it. Any idea what is happening? Any idea for some other way I can do what I want? Thanks for any help.

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  • Animation not start immediately when the target view is out of window

    - by funnything
    Hi. When I apply some animation to the view, which is out of window, the animation not start immediately. And then, I scroll the screen to show the animation target view, the animation will start. I hope to the animation will start immediately when it apply. Any ideas? Bellow is sample code. Thank you. public class AnimationValidationActivity extends Activity { private ViewSwitcher _viewSwitcher; private Button _button; /** * utility method for animation */ private Animation buildTranslateAnimation( float fromXDelta , float toXDelta , float fromYDelta , float toYDelta ) { Animation ret = new TranslateAnimation( fromXDelta , toXDelta , fromYDelta , toYDelta ); ret.setDuration( 1000 ); return ret; } /** * build view in place of layout.xml */ private View buildView() { ScrollView ret = new ScrollView( this ); ret.setLayoutParams( new LinearLayout.LayoutParams( LinearLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT , LinearLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT ) ); LinearLayout parent = new LinearLayout( this ); parent.setLayoutParams( new LinearLayout.LayoutParams( LinearLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT , LinearLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT ) ); parent.setOrientation( LinearLayout.VERTICAL ); ret.addView( parent ); _viewSwitcher = new ViewSwitcher( this ); _viewSwitcher.setLayoutParams( new LinearLayout.LayoutParams( LinearLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT , 100 ) ); parent.addView( _viewSwitcher ); View spacer = new View( this ); spacer.setLayoutParams( new LinearLayout.LayoutParams( LinearLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT , getWindow() .getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay().getHeight() ) ); parent.addView( spacer ); _button = new Button( this ); _button.setText( "button" ); parent.addView( _button ); return ret; } @Override public void onCreate( Bundle savedInstanceState ) { super.onCreate( savedInstanceState ); setContentView( buildView() ); _viewSwitcher.setFactory( new ViewSwitcher.ViewFactory() { @Override public View makeView() { TextView view = new TextView( AnimationValidationActivity.this ); view.setLayoutParams( new ViewSwitcher.LayoutParams( ViewSwitcher.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT , ViewSwitcher.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT ) ); view.setBackgroundColor( 0xffffffff ); view.setText( "foobar" ); return view; } } ); _button.setOnClickListener( new View.OnClickListener() { @Override public void onClick( View v ) { _viewSwitcher.setInAnimation( buildTranslateAnimation( _viewSwitcher.getWidth() , 0 , 0 , 0 ) ); _viewSwitcher.setOutAnimation( buildTranslateAnimation( 0 , - _viewSwitcher.getWidth() , 0 , 0 ) ); int color = new Random().nextInt(); _viewSwitcher.getNextView().setBackgroundColor( 0xff000000 | color & 0xffffff ); _viewSwitcher.showNext(); } } ); } }

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  • 2D Skeletal Animation Transformations

    - by Brad Zeis
    I have been trying to build a 2D skeletal animation system for a while, and I believe that I'm fairly close to finishing. Currently, I have the following data structures: struct Bone { Bone *parent; int child_count; Bone **children; double x, y; }; struct Vertex { double x, y; int bone_count; Bone **bones; double *weights; }; struct Mesh { int vertex_count; Vertex **vertices; Vertex **tex_coords; } Bone->x and Bone->y are the coordinates of the end point of the Bone. The starting point is given by (bone->parent->x, bone->parent->y) or (0, 0). Each entity in the game has a Mesh, and Mesh->vertices is used as the bounding area for the entity. Mesh->tex_coords are texture coordinates. In the entity's update function, the position of the Bone is used to change the coordinates of the Vertices that are bound to it. Currently what I have is: void Mesh_update(Mesh *mesh) { int i, j; double sx, sy; for (i = 0; i < vertex_count; i++) { if (mesh->vertices[i]->bone_count == 0) { continue; } sx, sy = 0; for (j = 0; j < mesh->vertices[i]->bone_count; j++) { sx += (/* ??? */) * mesh->vertices[i]->weights[j]; sy += (/* ??? */) * mesh->vertices[i]->weights[j]; } mesh->vertices[i]->x = sx; mesh->vertices[i]->y = sy; } } I think I have everything I need, I just don't know how to apply the transformations to the final mesh coordinates. What tranformations do I need here? Or is my approach just completely wrong?

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  • How to Generate Spritesheet from a 'problematic' animated Symbol in Flash Pro CS6?

    - by Arthur Wulf White
    In the new Flash Pro CS6 there is an option to generate spriteheet from a symbol. I used these tutorials: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/using-sprite-sheet-generator.html http://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creative-cloud-feature-tour-for-web/generating-sprite-sheets-using-flash-professional-cs6/ And it works really well! An artist I'm working with created a bunch of assets for a game. One of them is a walking person as seen from a top-down view. You can find the .fla here: https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B3L2bumwc4onRGhLcGNId1p2Szg/edit (If this does not work let me know, it is the first time I used Google Drive to share files) 1 .When I press ctrl+enter I can see it is moving. When I look for the animation, I do not seem to find it. When I select to create a spritesheet, flash suggest creating a spritesheet with one frame in the base pose and no other (animation) frames. What is causing this and how do I correct it? 2 .I want to convert it to a sprite sheet for 32 angles of movement. Is there any magical easy way to get this done? Is there a workaround without using Flash CS6 to do the same thing?

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  • File format for animated scene

    - by stephelton
    I've got a custom OpenGL based rendering engine and I'd like to add support for cinema-type scene animation. The artist that is helping me uses primarily 3DSMax. I'd like a file format for exporting and importing this data. I'm also in need of a file format for skeletal animation data, which may have an impact here. I've been looking at MAXScript to manually export this stuff, which would buy me the most flexibility, but I have virtually no experience with 3DSMax itself, so I get a little lost when it comes to terminology. So I'd like to know what file formats exist for animated scene data, and whether they are appropriate for my use (my fear is that they will be way too broad for my fairly simple needs.) The way I view animated scene data is basically a bunch of references to [animated] models with keyframe-based matrices describing their orientation over time. And probably some special camera stuff to handle perspective. I might also want some event type stuff for adding/removing objects. Is this a sane concept?

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  • Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

    - by mgibsonbr
    A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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  • Common way of animating 'motion' for walk cycle animations

    - by Ben Hymers
    I've just posted this at the Blender artists' forums before realising I would probably get a better response from a more game development-specific audience, so apologies for cross-posting! It's for the right reasons :) I'm a programmer trying to animate a character walking for a game project, using Ogre. I've made a very simple walk cycle in Blender and exported it to Ogre, and it plays just fine. By fine, I mean it works, but there's terrible foot sliding. This is because I just animated the walk in-place (at the origin) in Blender, and of course I don't know what "speed of walk" that corresponds to, so when I move the character in-game the motion doesn't necessarily match up with the movement of the feet in the animation. So my question is: what's the normal approach for this kind of thing? At work we use Maya, and the animators either animate a special 'moveTrans' node that represents the "position" of the character (or have the exporter generate it for them from the movement of the root node), then the game can read this to know how fast the animation moves the character. So in the Maya file, the character will walk forward for one cycle and this extra node will follow along with them by their feet. I've not seen anything like this in open-source land, and there's certainly no provision for that in the Ogre Exporter script. What do you chaps normally do for this?

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  • Player sprite moving slower on iPhone 4

    - by nvillec
    I just finished getting movement/jump animation for a player sprite in Xcode using Cocos2D. The basic movement algorithm is a timer that updates every 0.01 sec, changing the sprite position to (sprite.position.x + xVel, sprite.position.y + yVel). Each time a movement button is tapped, the appropriate velocity (initialized to 0) is changed to whatever speed I choose, then a stop movement button returns the velocity to 0. It's not an ideal solution but I'm very new at this and stoked to at least have that working with little help from the internet. So I may not have explained that perfectly, but it is in fact working to my satisfaction in Xcode's iPhone Simulator, however when I build it for my device and run it on my phone, the sprite's movement speed is noticeably slower than in Xcode. At first I thought it must have to do with the resolution of the iPhone 4, making the sprite's movement path twice as long, but I found that if I pull up the multitask bar, then return to the app the speed will sometimes jump back to normal. My second theory was that the code is just inefficient and is bogging the processes down, but I would see this reflected in the frame rate wouldn't I? It stays at 59-60 the whole time, and the spritesheet animation runs at the correct speed. Has anyone experienced this? Is this a really obvious issue that I'm completely missing? Any help (or tips for optimizing my approach to movement) would be much appreciated!

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  • Bejeweled-like game, managing different gem/powerup behaviors?

    - by Wissam
    I thought I'd ask a question and look forward to some insight from this very compelling community. In a Bejeweled-like (Match 3) game, the standard behavior once a valid swap of two adjacent tiles is made is that the resulting matching tiles are destroyed, any tiles now sitting over empty spaces fall to the position above the next present-tile, and any void created above is filled with new tiles. In richer Match-3 games like Bejeweled, 4 in a row (as opposed to just 3) modifies this behavior such that the tile that was swapped is retained, turned into a "flaming" gem, it falls, and then the empty space above is filled. The next time that "flaming gem" is played it explodes and destroys the 8 perimeter tiles, triggers a different animation sequence (neighbors of those 8 tiles being destroyed look like they've been hit by a shockwave then they fall to their respective positions). Scoring is different, the triggered sounds are different, etc. There are even more elaborate behaviors for Match5, Match-cross-pattern, and many powerups that can be purchased, each which produces a more elaborate sequence of events, sounds, animations, scoring, etc... What is the best approach to developing all these different behaviors that respond to players' "move" and her current "performance" and that deviate from the standard sequence of events, scoring, animation, sounds etc, in such a way that we can always flexibly introduce a new "powerup" ? What we are doing now is hard-coding the events of each one, but the task is long and arduous and seems like the wrong approach especially since the game-designers and testers often offer (later) valuable insight on what works better in-game, which means that the code itself may have to be re-written even for minor changes in behavior (say, destroy only 7 neighboring tiles, instead of all 8 in an explosion). ANY pointers for good practices here would be highly appreciated.

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  • What's the best way to use requestAnimationFrame and fixed frame rates

    - by m90
    I recently got into using the HTML5-requestAnimationFrame-API a lot on animation-heavy websites, especially after seeing the Jank Busters talk. This seems to work pretty well and really improve performance in many cases. Yet one question still persists for me: When wanting to use an animation that is NOT entirely calculated (think spritesheets for example) you will have to aim for a fixed frame rate. Of course one could go back to use setInterval again, but maybe there are other ways to tackle this. The two ways I could think of using requestAnimationFrame with a fixed frame rate are: var fps = 25; //frames per second function animate(){ //actual drawing goes here setTimeout(function(){ requestAnimationFrame(animate); }, 1000 / fps) } animate(); or var fps = 25; //frames per second var lastExecution = new Date().getTime(); function animate(){ var now = new Date().getTime(); if ((now - lastExecution) > (1000 / fps)){ //do actual drawing lastExecution = new Date().getTime(); } requestAnimationFrame(animate); } animate(); Personally, I'd opt for the second option (the first one feels like cheating), yet it seems to be more buggy in certain situations. Is this approach really worth it (especially at low frame rates like 12.5)? Are there things to be improved? Is there another way to tackle this?

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  • Scripts Casing Flash Intro Animation To Stop [migrated]

    - by ubique
    When my Flash website loads, it freezes halfway through the initial animation for 2-3 seconds and then continues. This obviously doesn't look great and I can't figure out what is causing it. Am thinking it is one of the scripts in index.html causing the issue and have tried all sorts of ways to correct it - what have I done wrong? <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>company name</title> . . . <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/flashobject.js"></script> <!--[if lt IE 7]> <link href="ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <header> <hgroup> <h1>company</h1> <h2>company</h2> </hgroup> </header> <div id="container"> <div id="head"> <div class="aligncenter"><a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-FLASH"> <img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_adobe_flash_player.png" alt="" /></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="g-plus" data-href="https://plus.google.com/100925740920754223119?rel=publisher" data-width="170" data-height="69" data-theme="light"> </body> <!-- Flash --> <script type="text/javascript"> var fo = new FlashObject("main_v10.swf", "head", "100%", "100%", "8", ""); fo.addParam("quality", "high"); fo.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true"); fo.write("head"); </script> <!-- Hello Bar --> <script type="text/javascript" src="//www.hellobar.com/hellobar.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> new HelloBar(39040,52484); </script> <!-- GPlus --> <script type="text/javascript"> window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en'}; (function() {var po = document.createElement("script"); po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true;po.src = "https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();</script> <!-- Google --> <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1']); _gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 10]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function init() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga,s); })(); window.onload = init; </script> </html>

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  • Hierarchical animations in DirectX and handling seperate animations on the same mesh?

    - by meds
    I have a hierarchical animated model in DirectX which loads and animates based on the following DirectX sample: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee418677%28VS.85%29.aspx As good as the sample is it does not really go into some of the details of animation that I'd like. For example, if I have a mesh which has a running animation and a throwing animation as seperate animation sets how can I get the throwing animation to occur for bones above the hip and the walking animation to occur for bones underneath the hip? Also if I wanted to for example have the person lean left or right would I simply have to find the bone for the hip and multiplay a rotation matrix by its matrix? In this case I think the matrix is m_amxBoneOffsets?

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  • how to retain the animated position in opengl es 2.0

    - by Arun AC
    I am doing frame based animation for 300 frames in opengl es 2.0 I want a rectangle to translate by +200 pixels in X axis and also scaled up by double (2 units) in the first 100 frames Then, the animated rectangle has to stay there for the next 100 frames. Then, I want the same animated rectangle to translate by +200 pixels in X axis and also scaled down by half (0.5 units) in the last 100 frames. I am using simple linear interpolation to calculate the delta-animation value for each frame. Pseudo code: The below drawFrame() is executed for 300 times (300 frames) in a loop. float RectMVMatrix[4][4] = {1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 }; // identity matrix int totalframes = 300; float translate-delta; // interpolated translation value for each frame float scale-delta; // interpolated scale value for each frame // The usual code for draw is: void drawFrame(int iCurrentFrame) { // mySetIdentity(RectMVMatrix); // comment this line to retain the animated position. mytranslate(RectMVMatrix, translate-delta, X_AXIS); // to translate the mv matrix in x axis by translate-delta value myscale(RectMVMatrix, scale-delta); // to scale the mv matrix by scale-delta value ... // opengl calls glDrawArrays(...); eglswapbuffers(...); } The above code will work fine for first 100 frames. in order to retain the animated rectangle during the frames 101 to 200, i removed the "mySetIdentity(RectMVMatrix);" in the above drawFrame(). Now on entering the drawFrame() for the 2nd frame, the RectMVMatrix will have the animated value of first frame e.g. RectMVMatrix[4][4] = { 1.01, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 };// 2 pixels translation and 1.01 units scaling after first frame This RectMVMatrix is used for mytranslate() in 2nd frame. The translate function will affect the value of "RectMVMatrix[0][0]". Thus translation affects the scaling values also. Eventually output is getting wrong. How to retain the animated position without affecting the current ModelView matrix? =========================================== I got the solution... Thanks to Sergio. I created separate matrices for translation and scaling. e.g.CurrentTranslateMatrix[4][4], CurrentScaleMatrix[4][4]. Then for every frame, I reset 'CurrentTranslateMatrix' to identity and call mytranslate( CurrentTranslateMatrix, translate-delta, X_AXIS) function. I reset 'CurrentScaleMatrix' to identity and call myscale(CurrentScaleMatrix, scale-delta) function. Then, I multiplied these 'CurrentTranslateMatrix' and 'CurrentScaleMatrix' to get the final 'RectMVMatrix' Matrix for the frame. Pseudo Code: float RectMVMatrix[4][4] = {0}; float CurrentTranslateMatrix[4][4] = {0}; float CurrentScaleMatrix[4][4] = {0}; int iTotalFrames = 300; int iAnimationFrames = 100; int iTranslate_X = 200.0f; // in pixels float fScale_X = 2.0f; float scaleDelta; float translateDelta_X; void DrawRect(int iTotalFrames) { mySetIdentity(RectMVMatrix); for (int i = 0; i< iTotalFrames; i++) { DrawFrame(int iCurrentFrame); } } void getInterpolatedValue(int iStartFrame, int iEndFrame, int iTotalFrame, int iCurrentFrame, float *scaleDelta, float *translateDelta_X) { float fDelta = float ( (iCurrentFrame - iStartFrame) / (iEndFrame - iStartFrame)) float fStartX = 0.0f; float fEndX = ConvertPixelsToOpenGLUnit(iTranslate_X); *translateDelta_X = fStartX + fDelta * (fEndX - fStartX); float fStartScaleX = 1.0f; float fEndScaleX = fScale_X; *scaleDelta = fStartScaleX + fDelta * (fEndScaleX - fStartScaleX); } void DrawFrame(int iCurrentFrame) { getInterpolatedValue(0, iAnimationFrames, iTotalFrames, iCurrentFrame, &scaleDelta, &translateDelta_X) mySetIdentity(CurrentTranslateMatrix); myTranslate(RectMVMatrix, translateDelta_X, X_AXIS); // to translate the mv matrix in x axis by translate-delta value mySetIdentity(CurrentScaleMatrix); myScale(RectMVMatrix, scaleDelta); // to scale the mv matrix by scale-delta value myMultiplyMatrix(RectMVMatrix, CurrentTranslateMatrix, CurrentScaleMatrix);// RectMVMatrix = CurrentTranslateMatrix*CurrentScaleMatrix; ... // opengl calls glDrawArrays(...); eglswapbuffers(...); } I maintained this 'RectMVMatrix' value, if there is no animation for the current frame (e.g. 101th frame onwards). Thanks, Arun AC

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  • Finding the endpoint of a named bone in Irrlicht

    - by Boreal
    I'm making a tank game that will have multiple tanks. I want to be able to define the weapon placements using bones that I can add right inside the modelling program (Blender to be exact). All tanks will have a bone called Body and a bone called Turret, and then names like Cannon0 and PickupGun for where the shots will be fired from that are attached to the Turret bone. Is there some way to find the absolute end position of a bone that I choose by name?

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  • XNA Skinned Model - Keyframe.Bone out of range exception

    - by idlackage
    I'm getting an IndexOutOfRangeException on this line of AnimationPlayer.cs: boneTransforms[keyframe.Bone] = keyframe.Transform; I don't get what it's really referring to. The error happens when keyframe.Bone is 14, but I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. The 14th bone of my model? What would that even be? I read this thread, but nothing there seemed to work. I don't have many bones, stray edges/verts, unassigned verts, unparented/non-root bones, or bones with dots in the name. What else can I be missing? Thank you for any help!

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  • I need help in animation of realistic page movement of pdf. just like code-flakes.com

    - by srnm12
    hi guys, i have to move the page of pdf in realistic way as you can see in code-flakes.com code-flakes have commercial api's but i want to write my own one. I got something that we can achieve this by using flash. flash will provide animation of realistic page movement. i don't know anymore guys.. Let me know how to this can be done? if you source send me on my id mohit.movil at gmail dot com any help will be great appreciate for me.. thnks

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