CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidmultithreading
umerbanday
umerbanday

Reputation: 76

UI not updating smoothly due to a background Thread

I am writing an android game and here is what i have:

Game loop is implemented as:

I have made a custom view which extends the view.Then inside my onDraw() method, i call invalidate();

MainActivity:

Here i make an instance of a custom view and use setContentView() to set that as my current view. I also use OnTouch() method to get touch events

Everything was working fine and smoothly till i did this:

I made a new class Graphthread and inside the run method, i created a loop.

public class Graphthread extends Thread
   {
    @Override
    public void run() { 
         while(true)
       {

        }
    }
     }

Then i created an instance of this in my MainActivity 

Graphthread gth = new Graphthread();

and used gth.start() in my onCreate method.

Now following happened:

The game did not run smoothly.Or i should say it was like..run for sometime..freeze for a few milliseconds...run again ...freeze again and so on.

What is happening?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 124

Answers (2)

weaknespase
weaknespase

Reputation: 1034

Try more suitable approach for games: use SurfaceView and background thread to draw on it. This should free you from stuttering, cased by irregular message processing by main thread.

onDraw hack, from my point of view, suitable only if you want to animate something inside a regular app (not game), and animation framework has little use for you. Panning and scaling image for example.

Upvotes: 0

Ashterothi
Ashterothi

Reputation: 3282

Slight jitters like that sounds like garbage collection. If your background thread (or something else) is consuming a very large amount of memory, the GC may need to run more often then expected. That would cause momentary jitters such as you described.

Upvotes: 1

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