Good morning.

I have a shading system in my game that currently I do it in an old school way.  I have the tiles basically 4 times (in three different shades.)

Is there an efficient way to shade (or lighten) tiles in 2D on the fly in java?  The one method I found seems quite expensive.

You could always draw a slightly transparent white (lighten) or black (darken) rectangle over a tile if the light is uniform

I advise you to stay away from Java2D when creating games. Java2D spend more time rendering than for example Slick2D does and, having fps such as 60 or higher is going to cause lag because Java2D can not render so many times per frame. So what is going to happen that it is going to skip rendering some frames, making the game look laggy, but in reality it is just rendering operation that are being aborted. Note that this do not happen on all computers, but you wanna make a game that looks the same on all computer, right?

whot are the two techniques that you mentioned?

In my experiences with Java2D, working with buffere images operation like LookupOp to perform process of the immage on the fly
is extremely heavy!

looking at the Garbage collection log, my games was using more that 10-15 time the memory with the effect!!!!
for sure, depend from the use that u did of the effect, but it is without doubt a heavy operation

 

ok now is clear, thanks
in your example you use on the top of your image a rectangle filled with a RadialGradientPaint
and you change just the alpha channel of the color,

now comparing the two solutions:
- 1) LookUpOp (that works at the pixel level so is for any pixel the operation must be performed)
- 2) rectangle filled with same Paint (like Gradient)

what is the best solution?

your experience say the first one, without your response my natural answer instead is the second, because I imagine that at low level the second one must use same low level directive to draw the rect.
but i don't know,i never tryed the second solution.
Do you know how works Graphics2D.fillRect method?


regarding the verify of the Garbage collection try to pass this parameter to your java command
-verbose:gc

this is the official link
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/gc-tuning-6-140523.html

if u works with eclipse in the console you will see the output of the GC

I just lowing the r,g,b channel value together. It turns darker.