scrolling stack I made

[Colin Holgate]

While at the conference I found time to figure out a couple of things. I used arrays for the first time (in LiveCode that is), and I found hardware acceleration settings that worked well.

The test I did was to have a scene doing parallax scrolling. The initial scene is made up of five slices, each 1024 wide, and significantly tall too. Those need to be on the card twice each, so that you can scroll the second copy into view as you move. That went well enough, so I added 101 LC logos to the scene, and it still moved well.

I made changes now so that you can try the effect on desktop, not just on mobile. If you do build this to mobile it uses the accelerometer, otherwise it uses the mouse position to control the scrolling speed.

Here's a zip file of the stack:

http://xfiles.funnygarbage.com/~colinholgate/rev/scrolling.zip

The stack script is this:

on preopenstack
   if the environment is mobile then
      iphoneSetRedrawInterval 1
      set the compositorType of this stack to "OpenGL"
      set the compositorTileSize of this stack to 64
      set the compositorCacheLimit of this stack to 1024*1024*128
   end if
end preopenstack


You are able to just turn on the acceleratedRendering of stack, but I wanted to have higher cache limits than the defaults.

The only other script is in the card, and some of the script only ever had to run once, to generate 100 of the LC logos. Here's the card script:

global places,worldx,difx

on opencard
   resetobjects
   put 0 into difx
   if the environment is mobile then mobileEnableAccelerometer 100
   moveworld
end opencard

on accelerationChanged pXAccel, pYAccel, pZAccel
   put min(100,max(-100,pYAccel*10)) into difx
end accelerationChanged

on moveworld
   if the environment is not mobile then
      put (512-the mouseh)/100 into difx
   end if
   movethings difx
   send moveworld to me in 16 milliseconds
end moveworld

on resetobjects
   lock screen
   put 0 into oldvalue
   put 0 into worldx
   put "" into places
   split places by return
   addimage "lc1",the left of img "lc1",8
   repeat with a = 1 to 100
      put "lc_"&a into imagename
      if there is not an image imagename then
         clone image "lc1"
         set the name of image the number of images to imagename
      end if
      set the width of image imagename to min(256,1024/min(101-a,100))
      set the height of image imagename to min(256,1024/min(101-a,100))
      set the top of image imagename to random(500)
      set the left of image imagename to random(2048)
      addimage imagename,the left of image imagename,min(10+(101-a) / 3,100)
   end repeat
   addimage "sky1",0,60
   addimage "sky2",1024,60
   addimage "hills1",0,40
   addimage "hills2",1024,40
   addimage "tracks1",0,20
   addimage "tracks2",1024,20
   addimage "farhedges1",0,10
   addimage "farhedges2",1024,10
   addimage "nearhedges1",0,5
   addimage "nearhedges2",1024,5
   movethings worldx
   repeat with a = 1 to the number of images
      set the layerMode of img a to dynamic
   end repeat
   unlock screen
end resetobjects

on addimage imagename, imageplace, imagespeed
   put imagename into places[imagename]["imagename"]
   put imageplace into places[imagename]["imageplace"]
   put imagespeed into places[imagename]["imagespeed"]
end addimage

on movethings howmuch
   lock screen
   repeat for each element a in places
      put a["imagename"] into imagename
      put a["imageplace"] +howmuch*100/a["imagespeed"] into newloc
      if newloc >= 1024 then
            subtract 2048 from newloc
      else
         if newloc < -1024 then
               add 2048 to newloc
         end if
      end if
      put newloc into places[imagename]["imageplace"]
      set the left of image imagename to trunc(newloc)
   end repeat
   unlock screen
end movethings


That worldx value ended up not being needed.

One thing about arrays I learned was that when you get an element of an array it's copy of that element, not a reference to it. My plan was to set the property in the element reference, and to expect that to immediately change the original value in the array. Turns out that it doesn't work that way, hence the line:

 put newloc into places[imagename]["imageplace"]