Fwd: Canvas rendering issues / Text Transition rendering issues

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Below is the email regarding the Tower Defender 'performance' issues. Someone did respond about a trick with the fonts which I think helped but there were still several problems. 


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Daniel Zwolenski <zonski at gmail.com>
> Date: 3 January 2013 11:13:57 AM AEDT
> To: "openjfx-dev at openjdk.java.net" <openjfx-dev at openjdk.java.net>
> Subject: Canvas rendering issues / Text Transition rendering issues
> 
> One of the goals of Richard's Tower Defender game is to test/showcase rendering performance and smoothness. The game is still very very ugly and basic but we have added some transitions and also included a Canvas background and we are starting to see some serious rendering issues. 
> 
> Richard probably hasn't a chance to look at these much yet so he may have more insight but it would be interesting to hear comments from others on what may be causing these issues (e.g. code in our end or code in the JFX end) and how to deal with them. 
> 
> There is an executable JAR of the (still very ugly game) at: https://bytebucket.org/rbair/fx-games/wiki/release/defender-jfx.jar 
> 
> All the code is at: https://bitbucket.org/rbair/fx-games/src (I can narrow down further to areas of interest if you need it - just ask).
> 
> When the game first loads we show an animated 'introduction' screen that has some basic Text transitions on it. This has some issues: 
> The first title text is very jittery as it zooms in
> The tag line that fades in does a noticeable, sudden jump at the end from what looks like a bolder font to a thin one (or anti-aliased or something). 
> The spinning text has a similar combination of the previous two issues 
> We have also added a Canvas as a background for the game in the 'grass' level (the 'brick' level uses a Pane as a background) and it has resulted in all sorts of odd problems. The canvas level has some pretty serious issues: 
> Towers (nodes) have some z-order issues when being placed before animations start
> Bad Guys (nodes) rendering outside of their parents clip bound's and then tend to leave a tail behind them (i.e. the back-buffer is not cleared or something) 
> Lots of flickering of Bad Guys when they are animating (again looks like z-order issues)
> Putting an overlayed light box with a translucent glass pane (click the 'New Game' button) causes all sorts of extreme, weird flickering and clipping problems
> Note that this could all be related to how we're using regions or something like that but even so it's pretty bad that we can make this happen even if we wanted to. The 'bricks' level uses a pane as it's background and works a treat with pretty much the exact same code. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Dan
> 
>