Question

So I’m working on developing a game for a school project and so far its gone well, but I have been trying to use a bitmap image instead of just using drawColor for the background, but doing so has make the game sluggish, not respond to to Touch Events, and ultimately crash after a while. Here is my code so far for making that background that keeps crashing, I am using the getColor before the drawBitmap as to blank out the previous background, because without that the moving character threads were leaving a “trail” and not being erased after every movement.

    canvas.drawColor(Color.BLACK);
    canvas.drawBitmap
    (BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(),R.drawable.park),0,0,null);

So any more effective method to make a static background image for the thread to move over would be appreciated!

Answer 1

What you are doing is that you are loading your bitmap everytime you’re rendering, which is why it runs slow and crashes after a while because of memory constraints. You should load your image once when you initialize everything:

// run once when you start the game
Bitmap background = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(),R.drawable.park);

In your render code:

canvas.drawBitmap(background);

And don’t forget too free the image when you’re done with it:

background.recycle();