I have an idea for an iPhone game that basically involves interacting with a grid of squares (think letterpress)
What would be the easiest way to create a grid of coloured squares that can be interacted with by touch?
UIKit, Cocos2d or some other means like OpenGL? I understand the benefits of UIKit would be that I would be able to get touch events for each box (if I made them an object/container etc) but may not be as fast as cocos2d and I probably have far less control.
If you want to stick with UIKit, a random "Grid Component" framework could do the job for you. For example there's GMGridView, which has touch handling and everything you probably need out of the box already. (Just check out the example project provided with GMGridView)
Related
Im just wondering what would the best way to display multiple instances of a small (10x1) image. I have an array of about 480 points and I would like to draw the image at each of these points to draw path. Would it be faster to use Core Graphics or should I be using something like cocos2d?
It depends on whether you need it to animate. Core Graphics is probably fine if you are drawing it once and then displaying it as an image, but it it will be really slow if you need to redraw it each frame.
UIKit is actually much quicker because UIView drawing is hardware accelerated, so you could just add a UIImageView for each point in the graph, but from my own experiments that will probably be too slow for realtime interaction if there is more than about 200 image views (at least if you want it to run on anything older than an iPhone 4S).
If you do need realtime performance, that really only leaves OpenGL, which is quite fiddly to set up unless you use a library like Cocos2D or Sparrow to simplify it. I'd suggest Sparrow for your purposes because Sparrow views can be used in a regular UIKit application, whereas Cocos2D provides a whole app framework and is harder to use for just a single view in an otherwise regular UIKit app.
http://www.sparrow-framework.org/
Without more context, another option is to use OpenGL and create a display list for the composite image.
I am in process of creating a multiplayer game similar to the Scrabble / Wordfued / Rummi. I am trying to see what would be best way go about implementing the UI and their interactions.
I would be having a framework which would keep track of all the pieces on the board and the AI for knowing if it is a valid move.
I am trying to figure out what could be best solution to handle the UI part. The game board would be larger than would the current iPhone screen could support. So the board would have an effect of a scroll view. The same goes for the game tiles using which user can play. These are not fixed amount of tiles/cards and the same could be more in numbers which would also need another scroll view kind of effect.
There would be many more effect's were the user can move a complete set of tiles/cards from the board and place it in another location of the board. Or even a tile in between the set of tiles on the board.
So I am trying so see if I should go with two scroll view provided by iOS and handle all the detaching the tile/card from one scroll view and placing the same in GameBoard scroll view
Or
Should I go with something like cocos-2d which provides more advance game UI handling capabilities.
Please do let me know your thoughts and feedback on what could be the best choice for the same. Thanks in advance for all your help.
Words With Friends uses native UIKit views. It is quite simple and uses a transition to move between the two degrees of magnification (close up and not close up).
You can do everything quickly in UIKit with a UIScrollview. You can use drag events to move tiles around the screen, even changing their perspective/look during dragging. Using UIAnimation would allow you to do simple frame based animation for things like dropping a tile.
Cocos2d will be quicker if you already know a similar gaming library. However if you choose it you you'll miss out on using Interface Builder and a lot of conveniences in UIKit.
If you're starting from a base of zero with either approach, then only use Cocos2d if you want particle effects (like stars and sparkles, UIKit has nothing for this).
Otherwise I'd say try UIKit, it's easier and there are more resources on the web.
Im looking for some sort of SDK or library on top of iOS, which might help me produce iPad/IPHONE games.
The sort of functionality Im looking for is..
GUI elements, skinnable buttons, lists, dialog boxes etc
Any routines to help with tile based games
Functions to paint and move sprites
Any vector libs to help with rotation, skew etc
Im confident I could write all this from scratch, but Im guessing theres some libraries already out there. Im not afraid of getting my hands dirty in code, so please dont slate me for asking for prebuilt stuff :)
Thanks
The defacto answer is cocos2d. Open source, MIT licensed, sprite library (including tiling map support baked in).
As for UI - Cocos has some helper utilities for dealing with UI elements, however its not very hard to skin UIKit (though the more customization you do the more drawing code you end up with).
most of the bits are already available in UIKit, but http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ is a framework worth looking at for game dev.
Two notes about cocos-2d:
- cocos has its own implementation of UI control called MenuItem. It can be used to easily emulate the behaviors of Buttons. There is also a simple layout algorithm to dispose this items in columns, rows, grids. There are also other controls that allow you to display text on the screen (labels). No text editors though, AFAIK.
- cocos can be easily integrated with the rest of UIKit, so it is simple to show standard "message boxes", some UIKit elements on top or behind it. I was able to use the cocos view as the child view of a UIImagePicker, for example.
I need to implement 'graphing paper' in an iPhone app. The user should be presented with a grid. They user can touch individual squares to turn them on, or if they're already on, off.The user can pinch to zoom and scroll around the paper as well..
So far I'm thinking Quartz 2D + UIScrollView is the way to do this but these are both areas of iPhone development that I'm unfamiliar with. Does this seem like a reasonable strategy?
Yes, this would be the way to go. You could also create a UIView and give it a background color based off an image (+[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:]), but, myself, I'd go with option (a).
I have to develop an application "Behavior like an Tetris game".
I have never used "OpenGL" for the iPhone application developement.
Application is something like this
Red / green / blue square boxes drop from top
Red + Red + Red = Points & boxes disappears
same way user has to make combination & get points
Different levels are there.
There are three buttons Left, Right for movement & bottom for speedy fall
For this kind of application should I use open GL or NOT?
i.e. Is it possible to develop entire application with view & it's animation?
If yes then, will it be more complex as compare to open gl?
What is the advantage of using open GL?
(I know that it gives good 2d, 3d look )
(But here my question means - easy coding?)
(Or open gl is more complicated as compare to objective-c?)
(I am just asking because I am not aware of it)
Basically your options are:
Using OpenGL
Using Quartz
Using UIKit
OpenGL is a fairly complicated beast, but is by far the best way to squeeze performance out of the iPhone. Do you need it for a Tetris game, though? Almost certainly not.
Quartz is the toolkit used in Mac OS X and the iPhone to draw images and do image effects. Because I come from an OpenGL background in other languages, I find Quartz strange and frustrating. However, it is probably easier for someone who is new to both.
You can do everything here using UIKit, and it will definitely be much much easier than other options. The main disadvantage is that it's rather slow in comparison, but once again doing a Tetris-like game shouldn't matter at all.
Before you go with UIKit, though, I recommend just checking out something like Cocos 2D, which will give you the advantages of OpenGL without the headache of dealing with all of its inner workings.
From the tone of your question it looks like you're confusing what OpenGL is and isn't with regard to Objective-C.
OpenGL is a library written in the C programming language (to put it simplistically) that excels at rendering shapes (especially 3D shapes) for display on a screen. It doesn't replace Objective-C inside your program, it merely assists you in drawing the shapes. If you don't use OpenGL, you'll need to write some sort of drawing/rendering code in your NSView (or subclass) to render the blocks. By using OpenGL, you will be provided a lot of helpful C methods for drawing shapes, which otherwise you'll have to implement yourself. On top of that OpenGL has thousands of man hours worth of drawing optimizations that you can take advantage of if you use it rather than trying to implement shape rendering yourself.
Having said that, OpenGL isn't all sunshine and roses. It works like a state machine and has its own assumptions about the way it will be used (like any API). Just because you know C and Objective-C doesn't mean that using OpenGL will be trivial. If you've never written any OpenGL code, I suggest you look into a reference like the venerable Red Book.
The thing to keep in mind is that OpenGL is not a language until itself (ignoring the OpenGL shading language). Its merely a set of C functions to aid you in rendering graphics.
You may well want to ask as well on http://iphonegamedev.stackexchange.com/, the new Stack Overflow variant just for iPhone gaming.
To learn & understand what you need.
Please go through following link.
it includes all necessary links for all kind of resources that you needed.
http://maniacdev.com/2009/04/8-great-resources-for-learning-iphone-opengl-es/
Edit :
After reading your question properly ( actually my question - By r & d I found solution).
I think - you need to develop a 2d application.
Go for the following link. Best option for 2d animation.
http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/
Don't forget to visit following link, if you needed sample codes.
http://monoclestudios.com/cocos2d_whitepaper.html