In Corona SDK How to hide a group if application suspended? - iphone

Question

I am building a word game and I want to hide the board when application is suspended?
the code looks fine however it givs a strange behaviour!!,
when I suspend the app nothing will happen but when i resume the application then the board will hide!!
local onSystem = function( event )
if event.type == "applicationSuspend" then
print("suspend")
board_group.alpha = 0
end
end
Runtime:addEventListener( "system", onSystem )
Note: you might wonder how do I know how the application looks when suspended?
the answer is: by pressing the home button twice.
example
SpellTower in normal state
https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/430k0c0b0y0b413d0b42/Image%202012.11.12%208:08:24%20AM.png?v=4822f549
SpellTower after pressing the home button twice
https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/280a1y0r2U3W321y1B2z/Image%202012.11.12%208:08:31%20AM.png?v=09c37567
you can see how they are hiding the letters, this is exactly what I want to do for my game, the only difference is i am using Corona SDK

Answer 1

When you do board_group.alpha = 0 you only has set a variable, the result will only take effect after a screen update.
But since the application is suspended... it won't update! So, changing any graphics on applicationSuspend don't work.

Answer 2

I believe the reason is because the application is not considered as suspended. In normal objective c programming it means that applicationWillResignActive is called when the user double clicks on the home button. So what you want to do is to add that code for this part.
Here is a flow of events:
http://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/07/understanding-ios-4-backgrounding-and-delegate-messaging/
Corona seems to have these events:
"applicationStart" occurs when the application is launched and all code
in main.lua is executed.
"applicationExit" occurs when the user quits the application.
"applicationSuspend" occurs when the device needs to suspend the application such as during a phone call or if the phone goes to sleep
from inactivity. In the simulator, this corresponds to the simulator
running in the background. During suspension, no events (not even
enterFrame events) are sent to the application while suspended, so if
you have code that depends on time, you should account for the time
lost to an application being suspended.
"applicationResume" occurs when the application resumes after a suspend. On the phone, this occurs if the application was suspended
because of a phone call. On the simulator, this occurs when the simulator was in the background and now is the foreground application.
So my guess is that you have to implement it outside of the corona API.
According to the corona documents you can implement them in the delegate:
You can intercept UIApplicationDelegate events via your implementation
of the CoronaDelegate protocol.
This protocol conforms to the UIApplicationDelegate protocol. Corona's
internal delegate will call your protocol's method if it is
implemented.
Please keep in mind the following:
Methods that Apple has deprecated will be ignored.
In most cases, your class' version will be invoked after Corona's corresponding version of the UIApplicationDelegate method. There is one situation in which your version will be called before.
In situations where the app is about to suspend or go to the background, your method will be called before Corona's version, e.g.
applicationWillResignActive: and applicationDidEnterBackground:.
http://docs.coronalabs.com/native/enterprise/ios/CoronaDelegate.html
But this is just a guess. Hope it helps!
Edit:
I was thinking, something really simple you could do is catch it outside and present a "pause" screen, then just hide it when the application enters foreground.

Answer 3

So if you can't do that (for now), one other option is to save application state when the application is about to terminate, and then set UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend = true in your plist file. This will cause the application to exit instead of suspending, which will avoid any screenshots, effectively "hiding" the board, etc. The downfall is, the app will have to read the session state when it launches again... this is only useful if your application can be designed to actually exit without losing your state, and is quite honestly, a little extreme. That said, it may be the only way to effectively do what you're trying to do.
Other ideas would be to see if you can add a large black layer to the screen, even though the application is suspending; perhaps this will somehow trigger an internal screen update by natively setting setNeedsDisplay. Also, instead of modifying the alpha, you might consider temporarily removing all of your layers and see if that has a similar effect.