Drawing and storing a user's touch path in libgdx

Question

I'm struggling with something I would expect to be straight forward with libgdx.

In short this is a "finger paint" app where I want to draw a path of a certain width where the user touches the screen.

I've earlier done this by using a plain Android android.view.View. I had a android.graphics.Path in which I stored the coordinates of the user's current touch. In the onDraw() method of the view I drew the path to the android.graphics.Canvas. Whenever the user released a finger I drew the path to an offline canvas/android.graphics.Bitmap which also was drawn in the onDraw() method. Plain and simple.

How can that be done using libgdx?

I have tried using a com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Pixmap that I can draw a line to whenever the user moves a finger. This works well except the fact that I'm unable to control the witdh of the line using Gdx.gl.glLineWidth(). I know I can draw a rectangle instead of a line to set the width, but Pixmap doesn't seem to have any means of rotating, so I don't see how this can be done.

I can use a com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.glutils.ShapeRenderer for drawing lines (or rectangles) in com.badlogic.gdx.Screen.render(). As far as I can see I then need to store every single touch point of the current touch, and then draw all lines on render. Whenever the user relases a finger I guess I can store the screen as-is with something like com.badlogic.gdx.utils.ScreenUtils.getFrameBufferPixmap(). Hopefully there is a easier way to achieve what I want.

Answer 1

I ended up drawing circles on a pixmap where the line should be:

• One circle on touchDown
• Several circles from last touch point to next touch point reported to touchDragged

I'm not very happy with this solution, but it kinda works.