Category: Games

Snake in Dart

Series: Groovy, Ruby, BASIC, Dart, Elm, Python3+Qt5

I’m writing the game Snake in lots of programming languages, for fun, and to try out new languages. This time, Dart, which is for people who love Java and wish they didn’t have to do JavaScript.

Slides: Snake in Dart

If you want to, you can Support me on Patreon.

Rabbit Escape 0.3.1 – now with zoom!

I’ve just release the latest version of Rabbit Escape, which makes things look a lot nicer because you can zoom in, getting you much closer to your rabbits:

rabbitescape-android-zoomed

There are still 60 levels of Lemmings and Pingus -like gameplay, all downloadable for free artificialworlds.net/rabbit-escape/.

I’ve also improved performance significantly, so you should notice things get smoother on older devices.

All those zoomed images increase the download size to 9MB, which is a pity, but that’s still pretty small.

Java game programming: image rendering hints make no difference to rendering time

I am writing an Open Source/Free Software Java desktop game (Rabbit Escape) and am experimenting with allowing you to zoom in so that the images being rendered are fairly big, and I’m seeing some slow-down.

[Note: Rabbit Escape is also available on Android, where it appears to have no problems with rendering speed…]

To speed it up, I have been experimenting with passing various values to Graphics2D‘s setRenderingHint method.

My conclusion is that on my platform (OpenJDK Java 7 on Linux) it makes no difference whatsoever. Please leave a comment if I’m doing it wrong.

I am timing how long each frame takes to render, and comparing the time when I insert this code before my rendering code:

// As slow and high-quality as possible, please!
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_ALPHA_INTERPOLATION, RenderingHints.VALUE_ALPHA_INTERPOLATION_QUALITY );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_COLOR_RENDERING, RenderingHints.VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_QUALITY );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_RENDERING, RenderingHints.VALUE_RENDER_QUALITY );

with inserting this before my rendering code:

// As fast and low-quality as possible, please!
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_OFF );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_ALPHA_INTERPOLATION, RenderingHints.VALUE_ALPHA_INTERPOLATION_SPEED );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_COLOR_RENDERING, RenderingHints.VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_SPEED );
g.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY_RENDERING, RenderingHints.VALUE_RENDER_SPEED );

[Documentation, such as it is, is here: RenderingHints.]

I see no appreciable difference in rendering time or image quality between these two setups, or when I leave out the calls to setRenderingHint completely.

Platform details:

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_75"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea 2.5.4) (7u75-2.5.4-1~trusty1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.75-b04, mixed mode)