Animate a Drawable in a custom view

I'm trying to animate a ShapeDrawable in a custom view. But I am not sure what the best method is to accomplish this task.

Should I try and draw a pawn on a path and call invalidate() until it has reached the destination square? Or is there some better method using maybe an AsyncTask or Handler?

Here is my code, I have omitted a lot of methods and variables in order to make it readable.

public class CheckerBoard extends View {

    public enum State implements Parcelable {
        EMPTY(0), WHITE(1), BLACK(2);
    }

        private final State[][] boardStates = new State[SIZE][SIZE];

    @Override
    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        canvas.drawColor(bgColor);
        for (int y = 0; y < SIZE; y++) {
            for (int x = 0; x < SIZE; x++) {
                if ((y % 2 == 0 && x % 2 != 0) || (y % 2 != 0 && x % 2 == 0)) {
                    drawRect(x, y, canvas);
                    drawPawn(x, y, canvas);
                }
            }
        }
    }

    private void drawRect(int x, int y, Canvas c) {
    }

    private void drawPawn(int x, int y, 开发者_开发知识库Canvas c) {
    }

    private void init() {
        setupBoard();
        pawnLinePaint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE);
        wPawnDrawable.getPaint().setColor(wColor);
        wPawnDrawable.getPaint().setShadowLayer(tileSize + 2, 4, 4, Color.GRAY);
        bPawnDrawable.getPaint().setColor(bColor);
        bPawnDrawable.getPaint().setShadowLayer(tileSize + 2, 4, 4, Color.GRAY);
        playerState = startState;
    }

    public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
        switch (event.getAction()) {
            case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN:
                int x = (int) (event.getX() / tileSize);
                int y = (int) (event.getY() / tileSize);
                if (selection[0] >= 0) { // A tile is already selected
                    if (isValidMove(selection[0], selection[1], x, y)) {
                        makeMove(x, y);
                        clearSelection();
                        switchPlayer();
                        invalidate();
                    }

                } else { // New selection
                    if (isValidSelection(x, y)) {
                        selection[0] = x;
                        selection[1] = y;
                        invalidate();
                    }
                }

                return true;
            default:
                return super.onTouchEvent(event);
        }
    }

    private void makeMove(int x, int y) {
        // Move the pawn to the new square
        boardStates[y][x] = boardStates[selection[1]][selection[0]];
        // Old square is now empty
        boardStates[selection[1]][selection[0]] = State.EMPTY;  
    }

    private void switchPlayer() {
        playerState = playerState == State.WHITE ? State.BLACK : State.WHITE;
    }

    public CheckerBoard(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init();
    }

    public CheckerBoard(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        init();
    }

    public CheckerBoard(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        init();
    }


    private class Pawn extends ShapeDrawable {
        public Pawn() {
            super(new OvalShape());
        }

        public void drawWithCircles(Canvas canvas, float x, float y){
            super.draw(canvas);
            canvas.drawCircle(x * tileSize + pawnDiameter, y * tileSize + pawnDiameter, pawnDiameter - pawnPadding,
                    pawnLinePaint);
            canvas.drawCircle(x * tileSize + pawnDiameter, y * tileSize + pawnDiameter, pawnDiameter - pawnPadding * 6,
                    pawnLinePaint);
            canvas.drawCircle(x * tileSize + pawnDiameter, y * tileSize + pawnDiameter, pawnDiameter - pawnPadding * 8,
                    pawnLinePaint);
        }
    }

}

Thank you for your help.

Blight

You should create two threads for your application. One thread is the UI thread that only draws the board in its current state. The other thread is the Game engine or animation thread that moves the items on the board.

The first thread runs at whatever your desired frame rate is and the 2nd thread should run considerably faster. This way you don't actually have to handle the animation yourself as the UI thread just draws the board as it currently is. In your engine thread you update the state of the game,board,chess pieces, every cycle of the thread.

Doing things this way has a couple of benefits. First your game's framerate won't drop if the Engine thread gets bogged down in some sort of computation. Second it allows you to abstract the drawing away from the game in a way that will make debugging much easier.

Take a progress bar for example. Let say you tried to create a file uploader with a progress bar but only had one thread. So you start the progress bar then start uploading the file. If the upload process is blocking then you have to wait for the file to finish uploading before you can update the progress bar, essentially rendering the progress bar useless. But if you did this with two threads then you could set it up so one thread simply updates the progress bars graphics based upon some common variable. The other tread is responsible for performing an action and updating the progress variable.

Check out these links for more info:

http://obviam.net/index.php/the-android-game-loop/

http://www.rbgrn.net/content/54-getting-started-android-game-development

http://www.helloandroid.com/tutorials/using-threads-and-progressdialog