Android Game Programming: A Developer’s Guide

Adding a frames-per-second (fps) counter

We have updated the DrawThread to run at an arbitrary number of frames per second, adapting to the time required to render instead of a fixed 30 fps, and we are using sprites. Now is the perfect time to add a frames-per-second counter. It is a very easy tool and is also handy to check performance.

We could have used a TextView, but there are some good reasons to draw it on the Canvas directly instead:

• The performance of SurfaceView suffers when we overlay other views on top of it
• It is an interesting example of other methods of drawing on the Canvas
• We can remove and add it without touching the layout

We will make a class named FPSCounter that extends from GameObject and looks like this:

public class FPSCounter ...