{"id":238,"date":"2015-03-01T09:25:36","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T08:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pixnbgames.com\/blog\/?p=238"},"modified":"2015-04-11T22:59:27","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T21:59:27","slug":"how-to-make-a-splash-screen-in-libgdx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixnbgames.com\/blog\/libgdx\/how-to-make-a-splash-screen-in-libgdx\/","title":{"rendered":"How to make a splash screen in LibGDX"},"content":{"rendered":"

An important aspect at\u00a0video game development is\u00a0the splash screen.<\/p>\n

What is the splash screen?<\/h4>\n

It is an screen which is shown to the user just when he opens the application. It is usually used to show some information to user while in background the app does the necessary load and preparations to run. We can see the use of splash screen, for example, on\u00a0Eclipse<\/a> or\u00a0GIMP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why is it important?<\/h4>\n

The more important issue is that the splash screen shows to the user that our app is running.<\/strong>\u00a0If the app needs many resources (common in a video game), it is probably the app spends some seconds on load all it. If we don’t do anything, our app will seem frozen along those seconds and in the better case it will only show a black screen.\u00a0By using the splash screen the user will know our app is opened and running.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, we can take advantage of the splash screen to show our trademark, any message, etc.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How to make it in LibGDX<\/h3>\n

For this example, I have going to use the class com.badlogic.gdx.Game<\/code> as superclass of the main class of my game, and every scene of the game will be an implementation of the interface com.badlogic.gdx.Screen<\/code>, because this is the way I usually work (see\u00a0Scenes management in LibGDX<\/a>). Let’s go to see the classes implementations:<\/p>\n

SplashScreen<\/h4>\n

The code of this class will be like this:<\/p>\n

package com.pixnbgames.splashscreen;\r\n\r\nimport com.badlogic.gdx.Gdx;\r\nimport com.badlogic.gdx.Screen;\r\nimport com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.GL20;\r\nimport com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture;\r\nimport com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch;\r\n\r\npublic class SplashScreen implements Screen {\r\n    private SpriteBatch batch;\r\n    private Texture ttrSplash;\r\n \r\n    public SplashScreen() {\r\n        super();\r\n        batch = new SpriteBatch();\r\n        ttrSplash = new Texture(\"splash-screen.png\");\r\n    }\r\n \r\n    @Override\r\n    public void render(float delta) {\r\n        Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1);\r\n        Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);\r\n \r\n        batch.begin();\r\n        batch.draw(ttrSplash, 0, 0, Gdx.graphics.getWidth(), Gdx.graphics.getHeight());\r\n        batch.end();\r\n    }\r\n \r\n    @Override\r\n    public void hide() { }\r\n \r\n    @Override\r\n    public void pause() { }\r\n \r\n    @Override\r\n    public void resume() { }\r\n\r\n    @Override\r\n    public void show() { }\r\n\r\n    @Override\r\n    public void resize(int width, int height) { }\r\n \r\n    @Override\r\n    public void dispose() {\r\n        ttrSplash.dispose();\r\n        batch.dispose();\r\n    }\r\n}<\/pre>\n
Key Issues:<\/h5>\n
It’s very important to stand out that this class must not depend on any other component which has not been loaded yet.<\/span> This is why this class draws directly an image on screen with a SpriteBatch<\/code> object.<\/p>\n
Supose you have a class in your project, ImageManager<\/code>, responsible of load and management of the graphics resources of our app.\u00a0Probably, ImageManager<\/code> should be initialized at the aplication startup, so that the resources it manages will be available to the rest of the game. Well, our SplashScreen<\/code> can not use this class. For two reasons:<\/p>\n