ParticleView 0.9.12

Custom Android view that helps you displaying large number of sprites. Implemented using OpenGL ES 2.0, resulting in significantly better performance than regular Canvas drawing.

Installation

Add jitpack.io repository to your root build.gradle:

allprojects {
 repositories {
    jcenter()
    maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
 }
}

Add dependency to your module build.gradle:

compile 'com.github.shchurov:particleview:0.9.12'

Key components

Component
ParticleView	The view itself
Particle	Keeps all the information about certain sprite (e.g., texture, position, size)
ParticleSystem	Keeps and updates particles over time
TextureAtlas	Contains all the textures
TextureAtlasFactory	Fires missiles on the other side of the Moon

Getting started

Check GettingStarted sample

• Add ParticleView to your layout
• Implement TextureAtlasFactory, ParticleSystem and bind them to the view
• Call ParticleView.startRendering()

Updating particles

While active ParticleView will call ParticleSystem.update(double timeDelta) before every frame. Use this method to update your particles' state. Note that it's called from rendering thread. You will also need to implement ParticleSystem.getMaxCount() that represents the maximum number of particles which will be displayed at the same time. It's required for allocating buffers of sufficient size.

Textures

In order to optimize rendering performance all textures should be packed inside TextureAtlas. To do this, you need to create TextureAtlas and put bitmaps there using TextureAtlas.addRegion(int x, int y, Bitmap bitmap) so they do not overlap. The library contains helper class SimpleTextureAtlasPacker that takes a list of bitmaps and generates TextureAtlas for you. Although its implementation is quite "naive", it should perform well in most cases. At certain stages ParticleView needs to re-create TextureAtlas, for this purpose TextureAtlasFactory is used.

Some tips

• Remember to call ParticleView.stopRendering() when its idle or invisible.
• To achieve better performance consider reusing particle objects instead of creating new instances every time. Check sample.

ToDo list

• add support for multiple TextureAtlases
• prevent invalid method calls by throwing exceptions
• improve built-in SimpleTextureAtlasPacker
• limit framerate to 60 keeping smoothness
• add some extra optional effects (blur?)

License

Copyright 2016 Mykhailo Shchurov

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.