Question

i make an app which would fire different small animation, such a falling rotating star or a like a text floating from bottom to top, animated with canvas on a surfaceview

they are all constant once fired,
so i planned 2 ways for that, 1 is a big thread which
handles them all animations, updates each after each other animation 1 after 1

or having for each kind of animation such as a falling star, have it’s own thread set up, and at each given point the main activity could have a command go on one of the threads, creating him, and starting, and than forgetting about him, letting him run in the background and at the end of the animation that thread will end it self.

so i don’t have to worry about storing each fired threads and such, cause i don’t know how many could start at a given time.

so will it be more memory efficient to fire random small short threads or have 1 big thread to handle it all? will it work more smoothly and better?

the animations are simply for visual enchantment and does nothing else, neither does it interact with other animations it simply starts, loops, ends.

i hope u understood :\

Answer 1

You probably want a SurfaceView with one thread handling all of your drawing. Having one thread per animation seems overly-complicated. You can certainly have one method per animation type, e.g. renderStars(), renderText(), etc. that are called whenever your one animation thread renders.

Recommended reading:

• The SurfaceView documentation
• The Canvas and Drawables API Guide – I’ve linked to the “On a SurfaceView” section, but you should probably read most of the document.
• The Lunar Lander sample app – The online code is currently 404-ing after Google recently revamped their developer site, but this link shows you where to find the code in the SDK manager.