What I am trying to do is to have many small rectangles on the screen (up to several thousand) which move randomly.
I have the mechanics behind this figured out (in terms of determining the coordinates for the movement), but I can’t figure out the best way to draw the shapes or model their movement.
A couple strategies I have tried have been, first, to subclass NSView (this is on the Mac) and create thousands of these. I then change their drawRect: function in order to draw a square inside of themselves. Then it is pretty simple to just change their locations to move them around. However, with several thousand allocated instances of these, performance is obviously terrible.
I tried a less object-oriented route also, just using NSRectFill to draw the thousands of rectangles. However, I had trouble implementing the movement I needed with this, though it was blazing fast.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could successfully create this animation?
Layers and Core Animation are the best approach for the platform.