android game over screen

Question

I have created this little game using SurfaceView and now I want to show the game over screen. Since the SurfaceView's update and render methods are being called by another Thread I want to know how to correctly inflate the game over XML and add it to the screen.

PD: by that I mean that I know I can use a reference to the activity, and I could do

public void render() {
  if(gameOver) {
    View gameOverView = LayoutInflater.from(activity).inflate(R.layout.gameover);
    // code to get the layout
    // and finally 
    layout.addView(gameOverView);
  }

but the thing is that activity was created in the UI thread, and render() is called by a secondary thread, so it throws an exception.

Answer 1

You way should work if you will wrap it in runOnUiThread:

public void render() {
  if(gameOver)
    activity.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {

    @Override
    public void run() {
        View gameOverView = LayoutInflater.from(activity).inflate(R.layout.gameover);
            // code to get the layout
            // and finally 
            layout.addView(gameOverView);

    }
    });
}

May be better to start another activity for the game over screen?