jMonkeyEngine.org

When starting AndroidHarness there is a delay of a few seconds before the game is actually displayed (at least on the devices I’ve tried and it gets longer when nifty is starting as well). Is there any interest in creating a mechanism to display a splash screen to hide the time between the app starting and the display being shown? If there are no objections and some interest, I was going to try to implement it. I was thinking of trying to add a parameter to AndroidHarness to pass a picture filename that would be displayed until the app display was ready. Any thoughts?

I would use a nifty screen for this but the time I want to hide is the time to start the app and nifty. I want something similar to the startup screen in app settimgs but for android. Make sense?

No, Android does not show this screen while the app is starting. I would like to create it so that the screen is displayed initially and then disappears and shows the main game automatically when the app display is ready for display.

No, Android does not show this screen while the app is starting. I would like to create it so that the screen is displayed initially and then disappears and shows the main game automatically when the app display is ready for display.

I Have this “issue” too, the problem is that we can’t really use Nifty for this because loading a simple screen with just text takes around 6 seconds with my tablet…

I’ll look into this and i’ll try to find a general solution.

Did you all deactivate niftys excessive logging on android? Logging can bog down the performance on android immensely.

I updated my app as you did with threading for the initiation of the game. I do not have Nifty yet. From what I can tell from the log, the splash screen displays 1.5 sec after the app is started and then the initial display of the app starts after another 1.5 sec (roughly).

I think I have a way to have the splash screen start immediately by changing the way “view” is attached to the activity layout, but it would require an engine change. Is that a possibility? If not, I won’t bother figuring out the details, but roughly, the idea is the following:
- change the activity layout to have a framelayout that contains both the surfaceview created by AndroidHarness and a ImageView that is overlaid on top of the surfaceview
- make the ImageView full screen to hide the SurfaceView
- have a callback from the context to AndroidHarness to remove or hide the ImageView when the app initialization is done (ie. just before simpleUpdate is called the first time

I think it can all be done within AndroidHarness except for the callback. I’m not sure where that would come from, maybe the Android specific OGLESContext (that’s where the SurfaceView Renderer code is).

Would that be a completely bad idea from an engine standpoint?

When I create the ImageView in my Activity and overlay it on top of the SurfaceView, the image shows up immediately, then is dismissed on the first simpleUpdate loop. There is no delay between the app starting and the splash screen display showing. Then after 3 seconds, the splash screen is turned invisible (and removed from the layout) and the app display is shown.

Below is rough code (very rough):

Main Activity:

@Override
 public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
     super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

     ((Main) app).setAndroidListener(this);

     showSplash = true;
     if (showSplash) {
          frame = new FrameLayout(this);
          setContentView(frame);
          frame.addView(view);
          img = new ImageView(this);
          img.setImageResource(R.drawable.monkey);
          WindowManager wind = this.getWindowManager();
          Display disp = wind.getDefaultDisplay();
          FrameLayout.LayoutParams lp = new FrameLayout.LayoutParams(
               FrameLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT,
               FrameLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT
          );
          frame.addView(img, disp.getWidth(), disp.getHeight());
     } else {
          setContentView(view);
     }

}

public void onUpdate(float tpf) {
    if (showSplash) {
        this.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                img.setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE);
                frame.removeView(img);
            }
        });
        showSplash = false;
    }
}

Main Game Class:

@Override
public void simpleUpdate(float tpf) {
    if (firstUpdate) {
        if (androidListener != null) {
            androidListener.onUpdate(tpf);
            logger.log(Level.INFO, "Calling onUpdate");
        }
    }
    firstUpdate = false;
}