I made some timeline animations in choregraphe. They all work perfectly fine in the simulator, but once I use a real life robot the animations speed up or move in a jerk-like fashion in certain spots of the animation putting stress on the motors.
The motion is set to passive mode with 25 fps, I assume this is default, because I haven't touched this
I tried to allow more frames to pass between the moments the "speed up" occurs, but that doesn't work..
It's possible "background movements" are running at the same time as your animation. Before playing your animation, first disable autonomous life (the heart icon in Choregraphe), then make the robot stand up (sun icon). At this point the robot should be standing and completely motionless.
If your animation has issues in that state, then it could be something else, like the self-collision protection adjusting the motion on the fly, or the fall detection. In any way, that means you would have to fix your animation at this point.
Related
So here's my setup:
Camera images coming in at 1920x1080 # 25 FPS
Writing image data to WriteableBitmap on UI thread (simple copy, no processing)
Two Image controls in two different windows on two different monitors has their Source property set to the WriteableBitmap
Some generic UI stuff goes over the camera images
This works great, uses about 4% CPU on an old laptop (8 logical processors). The video is as smooth as can be. However, my UI has some animations (stuff moving around). When the camera display is running, those animations gets choppy.
Right now, the camera image is in Gray8 format, so it will be converted (I guess when calling WritePixels?). I also tried forcing one of the animations to 25 FPS too, no change.
Where should I start to resolve this? Is the issue that I'm locking the bitmap for too long, or is there something else going on? From what I can see locking the bitmap will cause the render thread to block, so moving that to another thread seems pointless. And it does feel like that somewhat defeats the purpose of WriteableBitmap.
This is always going to be tricky because you're capturing at 25FPS whilst WPF tries to update at 60. It's difficult to offer any meaninful advice without seeing a testable project but I'd probably start by doing the updates in a CompositionTarget.Rendering handler.
I have a WPF application showing a large image (1024x1024) inside a ZoomableCanvas. On top of the image, I have some 400 ellipses. I'm handling touch events by setting IsManipulationEnabled="True" and handling the ManipulationDelta event. This works perfectly when zooming slowly. But as soon as I start zooming quickly, there is a sudden frame-rate drop resulting in a very jumpy zoom. I can hear the CPU fan speeding up when this occurs. Here are some screenshots from the WPF Performance Suite at the time when the frame-rate drops:
Perforator
Visual Profiler
Software renderer kicks in?
I'm not sure how to interpret these values, but I would guess that the graphics driver is overwhelmed by the amount of graphics to render, causing the CPU to take over some of the job. When zooming using touch, the scale changes by small fractions. Maye this has something to do with it?
So far, I have tried a number of optimization tricks, but none seem to work. The only thing that seems to work is to lower the number of ellipses to around 100. That gives acceptable performance.
Certainly this is a common problem for zoomable applications. What can I do to avoid this sudden frame-rate drop?
UPDATE
I discovered that e.DeltaManipulation.Scale.X is set to 3.0.. in the ManipulationDelta event. Usually, it is around 1.01... Why this sudden jump?
UPDATE 2
This problem is definitely linked to multi-touch. As soon as I use more than one finger, there is a huge performance hit. My guess is that the touch events flood the message queue. See this and this report at Microsoft Connect. It seems the sequence Touch event -> Update bound value -> Render yields this performance problem. Obviously, this is a common problem and a solution is nowhere to be found.
WPF gurus out there, can you please show how to write a high performance multi-touch WPF application!
Well I think you've just reached the limits of WPF. The problem with WPF is that it tesselates (on CPU) vertex grafics each time it is rendered. Probably to reduce video memory usage. So you can imagine what happens when you place 600 ellipses.
If the ellipses are not resized then you could try to use BitmapCache option. In this way ellipses will be randered just once in the begining and then will be stored as textures. This will increase memory usage but should be ok I think.
If your ellipses are resized then previous technic won't work as each ellips will be rerendered when resized and and it will be even slower as this will rewrite textures (HW IRTs in perforator).
Another possibility is to design special control that will use RenderTargetBitmap to render ellipses to bitmaps and then will render it through Image control. In this way you can control when to render ellipses you could even render them in parralel threads (don't forget about STA). For example you can update ellipse bitmaps only when user interaction ends.
You can read this article about WPF rendering. I don't agree with the author who compares WPF with iOS and Android (both use mainly bitmaps compared to WPF). But it gives a good explanation about how WPF performs rendering.
I've been playing around with Silverlight 5 and started putting together a little game. It's nothing special and it's purely to just play around.
If you look at the link below you'll notice that it's lagging a bit.
Link(Just use the arrow keys): http://www.netauto.co.za/WIP/GameTest.html
Basically I'm using a Storyboard to scroll the road and move the cars on the screen with every tick. At first I used the CompositionTarget.Rendering, but I was having the same problem. So I thought I'll try a Storyboard, but it made no difference.
There is a second timer that adds a vehicle in a random lane with every tick. They get removed once they go off screen. Disabling this timer makes no difference.
CPU usage is almost none. Also tried it on another PC and it was exactly the same.
I would post some code, but there's quite a bit of it and as I'm just fooling around it's a bit of a mess 0.o
Any ideas on how I can move the objects around without that lag?
I'm using Silverlight 5.
Thank you
You can try to use BitmapCache on the scrolling road and cars, if you are not already. This can cut down on the traffic to the GPU.
More links: One, Two.
In my WPF app I have a control representing a pack of 20 cards (each about 150x80 px) that fan out in an arc, so they're all slightly overlapping in the centre of the arc. When the control is added there's an animation to fan them out.
After that, the fan/control can be moved around, and when the user hovers over a card it expands and then goes back to normal size when they move off it.
This all works fine, but has a noticeable effect on performance- everything is very jerky, presumably because when other things move all the overlapping stuff and transforms in the control are being constantly recalculated/redrawn.
Any suggestions for how I can improve performance while still keeping individual cards in the fan responsive?
To find the source of the slowdown you need to profile.
Try to find out whether or not WPF is switching back to software rendering or not.
After that try to run on a different computer with other (better) hardware/graphics card.
If it doesn't get any better there might be errors in your app.
I'm using VB.net 2010 and WPF 4. I need to have a smooth transition between two videos played on the mediaelement. I absolutely cannot use anything that requires me to use a winhost in the WPF window, as that will make my project impossible (since the video is full screen, and the controls are over the video)
Basically, I need for the video to play through, and then smoothly go to another video specified in code behind. I cannot splice the two videos together - they must be separate.
How do I have the videos transition smoothly, with no "blink"?
I'm guessing without testing here. You're probably going to need some CPU cores and a good video card.
If you have the memory, use two MediaElements.
Queue up both videos, one on each element.
Set the opacity of the second one to completely transparent. They're UIElements so this should work...
Use timers of some kind keyed from the start of playback on the first one so that you get an event a couple of seconds before playback ends.
With that event delegate, start the video in the second MediaElement, animate the first one's opacity to zero while simultaneously animating the second one to fully opaque.
If you need to do it again, set up the timer again and make sure your delegate animates things the other way.