So I am having a little hard time understanding how ortographic cameras work in libgdx.
what I want is to have a camera that will only render things within a square while having another camera set the bounds for my whole screen.
So here, I was able to do what I wanted on the whole screen for the game pad. But, the thing you see on the top right is the background map of the game and i want to render the parts only fall within the red square you see here. How do I achieve that?
Are cameras supposed to do that or do I need to figure out a way to do it manually? I am really confused as to how cameras and projection matrices work.
Here on this screen, The red square and the green pad on the left are being drawn using the projection matrix of my screen camera. The map(top right) is drawn using my map cam.
Map cam is a view port of 400x400 but as you can see , the tiles are rectangular and that isnt the aspect ration i want. If someone can briefly explain how cameras work , I'd greatly appreciate it.
The reason I am not posting my code here is because I feel like I need to understand how camera mechanics work to even code it properly so I want to address that issue first.
Following #Tenfour04's advice worked perfectly. In case anyone wonders what I wanted to achieve. Here's a picture.
A camera alone cannot crop off part of the screen. For that you need to use glViewport. There is already a Viewport class in Libgdx that can do that for you. You will need two orthographic cameras (one for the map and one for the GUI), but the viewport can create its own.
private Viewport viewport;
//in create:
viewport = new FitViewport(400, 400);
//in resize:
viewport.update(width, height);
//in render:
viewport.getCamera().position.set(/*...move your map camera as needed*/);
viewport.apply(); //viewport cropped to your red square
batch.setProjectionMatrix(viewport.getCamera().combined);
batch.begin();
//draw map
batch.end();
//return to full screen viewport
Gdx.gl.glViewport(0, 0, Gdx.graphics.getWidth(), Gdx.graphics.getHeight());
batch.setProjectionMatrix(yourGUICamera.combined);
batch.begin();
//draw gui
batch.end();
What happens, is the camera will fit itself to the size of the screen. In order to change this, you would want to use a FrameBuffer. The frame buffer will constrain the camera into the desired size, then can be drawn as a texture.
Create the frame buffer with the dimensions being in pixels.
//Initialize the buffer
FrameBuffer fbo = new FrameBuffer(Format.RGB565, width, helght, false);
Render the world within the buffer.
fbo.begin();
//Draw the world here
fbo.end();
Draw the buffer to the screen with a batch.
batch.begin();
batch.draw(fbo.getColorBufferTexture(), x, y);
batch.end();
I have a background image that I wish to stay in the same position on the screen. So, as I advance with my spaceship and move the camera with the spaceship the same background image would stay on the screen. Is there a way to draw the backgroung image on the screen without having to move it along with the camera ? Like for example using a special layer or something so no aditional matrix translations are needed to also move the BG image?
There is camera.unproject(Vector2 vector) function in the libGDX camera class. To put the background image at a certain location on the screen you just need to unproject it every time you are drawing and draw onto the sprite batch from the unprojected co-ordinates. E.g:
Vector2 position = new Vector2(10,10); //Can be anything, the x and y of where the background should be
camera.unproject(position); //Unproject the co-ordinates to the position of the camera, this will be stored back in the position vector
batch.draw(background, position.x, position.y); //You can then draw to your sprite batch from the unprojected co-ordinates
SpriteBatch.SetProjectionMatrix(cam.combined) makes Spritebatch not draw blocks and my character but camera movement works, but if I don't use this line of code everything is drawn but camera is not working? Does anyone know the solution, because if simply can't see it.
EDIT: sorry for the messy first post
Here is the piece of code that is troublesome:
public void render()
{
cam.update();
spriteBatch.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined);
spriteBatch.begin();
drawBlocks();
drawBob();
spriteBatch.end();
cam.position.x = world.bob.GetPosition().x;
cam.update();
drawCollisionBlocks();
if(debug)
drawDebug();
}
I found the solution but for anyone who may have this kind of problem in the future, the problem was in drawing methods where i was drawing
textures like this:
CODE:
spriteBatch.draw(bobFrame, bob.GetPosition().x * PPuX, bob.GetPosition().y*PPuY ,Bob.SIZE*PPuX , Bob.SIZE*PPuY );
PPuX,PPuY were of type int and were used for different screen sizes and that was messing spriteBatch up when i was setting the projection matrix
The spriteBatch.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined) lets spriteBatch use the coordinate system that specified by cam instead of the default ones. This is because the both's coordinate system are different and the cam.combined will do the maths for you.
I believe you actually ARE drawing the sprites, however you are not seeing them because your camera viewports are not set(ie. you are looking at the wrong coordinate area).
Adding
cam.setToOrtho(false); //true to invert y axis
"Sets this camera to an orthographic projection using a viewport fitting the screen resolution, centered at (Gdx.graphics.getWidth()/2, Gdx.graphics.getHeight()/2), with the y-axis pointing up or down."
Link to JavaDOC here
First I would like to know if it's possible to rotate a Mesh without drawing it.
If it is possible then how could I get the new vertices of the rotated mesh?
I need this to verify if a certain Mesh is still inside a rectangle after rotation and, I only want to draw it if it still's inside.
I have been searching for a introductory to 2D selection in OpenGL ES in Stack Overflow. I mostly see questions about 3D.
I'm designing a 2D tile-based level editor on Android 4.0.3, using OpenGL ES. In the level editor, there is a 2D, yellow, square object placed in the center of the screen. All I wanted is to detect to see if the object has been touched by a user.
In the level editor, there aren't any tiles overlapping. Instead, they are placed side-by-side, just like two nearby pixels in a bitmap image in MS Paint. My purpose is to individually detect a touch event for each square object in the level editor.
The object is created with a simple vertex array, and using GL_TRIANGLES to draw 2 flat right triangles. There are no manipulations and no loading from a file or anything. The only thing I know is that if a user touches any one of the yellow triangles, then both yellow triangles are to be selected.
Could anyone provide a hint as to how I need to do this? Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
This is the draw() function:
public void draw(GL10 gl) {
gl.glPushMatrix();
gl.glTranslatef(-(deltaX - translateX), (deltaY - translateY), 1f);
gl.glColor4f(1f, 1f, 0f, 1f);
//TODO: Move ClientState and MatrixStack outside of draw().
gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
gl.glVertexPointer(2, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices);
gl.glDrawArrays(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6);
gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
gl.glPopMatrix();
}
EDIT 2:
I'm still missing some info. Are you using a camera? or pushing other
matrixes before the model rendering?. For example, if you are using an
orthographic camera, you can easily unproject your screen coordinates
[x_screen, y_screen] like this (y is analogous):
I'm not using a camera, but I'm probably using an orthographic projection. Again, I do not know, as I'm just using a common OpenGL function. I do pushing and popping matrices, because I plan on integrating many tiles (square 2D objects) with different translation matrices. No two tiles will have the same translation matrix M.
Is a perspective projection the same as orthographic projection when it comes to 2D? I do not see any differences between the two.
Here's the initial setup when the surface is created (a class extending GLSurfaceView, and implementing GLSurfaceView.Renderer):
public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) {
gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height);
}
public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig arg1) {
reset();
}
public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) {
clearScreen(gl);
gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION);
gl.glLoadIdentity();
gl.glOrthof(0f, super.getWidth(), 0f, super.getHeight(), 1, -1);
gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW);
gl.glLoadIdentity();
canvas.draw(gl);
}
private void clearScreen(GL10 gl) {
gl.glClearColor(0.5f, 1f, 1f, 1f);
gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
}
A basic approach would be the following:
Define a bounding box for each "touchable" object. This could be
just a rectangle (x, y, width, height).
When you update a tile in the world you update its
bounding box (completely in world coordinates).
When user touches the screen, you have to unproject screen
coordinates to world coordinates
Check if unprojected point overlaps with any bounding box.
Some hints on prev items.[Edited]
1 and 2. You should have to keep track of where you are rendering
your tiles. Store their position and size. A rectangle is a
convenient structure. In your example it could be computed like
this. And you have to recompute it when model changes. Lets call it Rectangle r:
r.x = yourTile.position.x -(deltaX - translateX)
r.y = yourTile.position.y -(deltaY - translateY)
r.width= yourTile.width //as there is no model scaling
r.height = yourTile.height//
3 - if you are using
an orthographic camera, you can easily unproject your screen
coordinates [x_screen, y_screen] like this (y is analogous):
x_model = ((x_screen/GL_viewport_width) -0.5 )*camera.WIDTH + Camera.position.x
4 - For each of your Rectangles check if [x_model; y_model] is inside it.
[2nd Edit] By the way you are updating your matrixes, you can consider you are using a camera with postition surfaceView.width()/2, surfaceView.height()/2. You are matching 1 pixel on screen to 1 unit in world, so you dont need to unproject anything. You can replace that values on my formula and get x_screen = x_model - (You 'll need to flip the Y component of the touch event because of the Y grows downwards in Java, and upwards in GL).
Final words. If user touches point [x,y] check if [x, screenHeight-y]* hits some of your rectangles and you are done.
Do some debugging, log the touching points and see if they are as expected. Generate your rectangles and see if they match what you see on screen, then is a matter of checking if a point is inside a rectangle.
I must tell you that you should not set the camera to screen dimensions, because your app will look dramatically different on different devices. This is a topic on its own so i won't go any further, but consider defining your model in terms of world units - independent from screen size. This is getting so off-topic, but i hope you have gotten a good glimpse of what you need to know!
*The flipping i told you.
PS: stick with the orthographic projection (perspective would be more complex to use).
Please, allow me to post a second answer to your question. This is completely more high-level/philosophical. May be a silly, useless answer but, I hope it will help someone new to computer graphics to change it's mind to "graphics mode".
You can't really select a triangle on the screen. That square is not 2 triangles. That square is just a bunch of yellow pixels. OpenGL takes some vertices, connects them, process them and colors some pixels on the screen. At one stage on the graphics pipeline even geometrical information is lost, and you only have isolated pixels. That's analogous to a letter printed by a printer on a paper. You usually don't process information from a paper (ok, maybe a barcode reader does :D)
If you need to further process your drawings, you have to model them and process them yourself with auxiliary data structures. That's why I suggested you created a rectangle to model your tiles. You create your imaginary "world" of objects, and then render them to screen. The user touch-event does not belong to the same world, so you have to "translate" screen coordinates into your world coordinates. Then you change something in your world (may be the user drags her finger and you have to move an object), and back again tell OpenGL to render your world to screen.
You should operate on your model, not the view. Meshes are more of a view thing, so you shouldn't mix them with the model information, it's a good practice to separate both things. (please, an expert correct me, I'm quite a graphics hobbyist)
Have you checked out LibGDX?
Makes life so much easier when working with OpenGL ES.