Android Popping Bubbles Example
This example is a bit simpler than the bouncing ball demo I posted ten days ago. When you tap the screen, a bubble appears. This bubble grows until it pops. Tapping several times makes several bubbles.
Goals:
- Animate many different objects. In this case, growing circles. There is only one background thread running the “game loop”. It keeps a list of circle positions and sizes. You could easily apply this same concept to any kind of animation.
- Play a popping sound when each bubble pops.
The pop sounds like crap on the phone, even worse in the video. You can find the original popping sound on freesound.org. I clipped the sound (using Audacity) to make it play faster, I suspect it can be improved with some work.
You can find the source code for BubblesModel.java and BubblesActivity.java on GitHub.
This app still has a serious bug, described in this Android Developer’s Post. Let me know if you know how to fix this!
Aside from that bug, this is not production-ready code. It is pretty sloppy with memory, copying a List of Bubble objects on each iteration of the game loop. I opted for brute force synchronization just to make it work. For a real game, I’d spend more time on fine-tuned locking and sharing objects to minimize garbage collection.
