Maximum Refresh Rate of A Widget

Question

I know that the default is 30 minutes, however I am looking at making a game in a widget

This would require millisecond responses.... has anyone messed with the AlarmClock Timing that is described to use instead to achieve this? does it work well?

I haven't finished the Software Arc for the project yet because I see a lot of complaints about this on the net, so need to know if this is feasable before I go for the adventure... but the game would consist of a large widget size of one screen... many areas to click on and interact with and multiple textured animations

Looks like I can draw to a canvas and then pop it up to the bitmap to do this... but that still confuses me a bit, so if anyone knows of some good tutorials I would greatly appreciate it

this is what I was told works:

Code: Paint p = new Paint(); p.setAntiAlias(true); p.setStyle(Style.STROKE); p.setStrokeWidth(8); p.setColor(0xFFFF0000);

        Bitmap bitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(100, 100, Config.ARGB_8888);
        Canvas canvas = new Canvas(bitmap);
        canvas.drawArc(new RectF(10, 10, 90, 90), 0, 270, false, p);

       // RemoteViews views = new RemoteViews(updateService.getPackageName(), R.layout.main);
        RemoteViews updateViews = null;

        updateViews.setImageViewBitmap(R.id.canvas, bitmap);

        ComponentName componentName = new ComponentName(updateService, DashboardAppWidgetProvider.class);
        AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager = AppWidgetManager.getInstance(updateService);
        appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(componentName, views);

but I am struggling with the concepts of this code having an ID for the canvas and how to use that so I have not been able to test this code

(I am a experienced c/c++/c#/dx/opengl coder first time with android and java)

Thank you!

Answer 1

however I am looking at making a game in a widget

I would not recommend that.

This would require millisecond responses

This is highly impractical, considering that the home screen runs in a different process than does your game code.

has anyone messed with the AlarmClock Timing that is described to use instead to achieve this? does it work well?

AlarmManager is not designed for firing multiple events per second.

but the game would consist of a large widget size of one screen

You cannot specify an app widget that is "size of one screen". You have to specify a size, and that size cannot vary by hardware screen size.

many areas to click on and interact with and multiple textured animations

Animations are not possible in app widgets.

Looks like I can draw to a canvas and then pop it up to the bitmap to do this

That will be inefficient, considering that your code and the home screen are running in separate processes.

You could write an alternative home screen and put your game in it. Then, your performance limits fall away, and you can do animations and whatever else you want. Of course, you need to add a lot of home screen functionality, or users will not want to make your app their home screen.

Answer 2

Animations are possible but very limited.

The process priority of homescreen widgets seems to be very very low. You can fire Alarms as many as you want, but there are some problems stopping them correctly when device is in sleepmode or so, otherwise you get in real problems with power-consumption of your device.

Any alarm you set will fire an event, but as long as cpu is working more or less you never get equal execution times for that.

Another reason for problems is the refresh rate for graphics. You can draw anything you want within such alarmevents, but the widget-drawer of android has a very bad refresh-model. You never get to know, wich graphics are really drawn to the user.

I am a developer of the new "Animated Rolling Clock Widget" ( http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/lifestyle/animated-rolling-clock-widget_lviw.html?nav=recategorized ) and there has been some real difficult things to manage for us to get this working as expected. If you try this one out, you can see the limitations of refreshing really fast.

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