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.
Related
I want to make an endless vertical scrolling layer that gives the impression that the main character is moving upwards. I have been brainstorming on how to achieve this.
My issue is that I want objects to appear as if they are coming from above and below the screen at the same time. Secondly, I want to be able to move the main character to create and destroy box2d joints between it and some of the objects appearing on the screen. What is the best way to achieve this with consuming too much memory? I would appreciate any help on this.
Apple did a wonderful tutorial of this in a WWDC 2011 video session. It was "UITableView Changes, Tips & Tricks" and it's about 35m40sec into the video.
Since the use of the UITableView is really just a UIScrollView for the purposes of the background, you could just use a UIScrollView and you can either have it move on timer or events as needed.
Think of your player as moving within a stationary bounding box. The background can scroll using the aforementioned pooling method (as the background tile scrolls off the screen it is placed into a pool, and before a new tile is instantiated the pool is checked for available reusable tiles). Thirdly, your enemy objects will simply approach from either the bottom of the screen or the top.
Imagine your idea without the scrolling background (flying effect) and you should find that the problem is relatively straightforward.
I also needed and endless scrolling background layer. This can do exactly that, and it is super simple to set up and use. Just copy the four files in to the cocos2d folder in your project, then follow the quick tutorial seen on the github. Make sure the image you use is seamless (when you line them up vertically you can't tell where one ends.
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)
I am beginner for interactions on iphone. I have 3 buttons, one on the left, and the 2 other ones on the right. I would like to push the left button with finger and display a line real time stretching with my finger moving on screen that goes to the other button I am going to go to on the right - and then I reach the button on the right and release my finger the line stays on screen.
Where should I start in the manual to understand how to do something like this?
- please don't say page 1 ;-)
thanks for all the pointers so I can learn and write the code myself
Cheers,
geebee
Wow, uh, you're jumping right into the deep end.
First, the answer to your question is ... check out the Sample Code at developer.apple.com. By playing with those sample projects, and running them in the debugger, and reading that code, you can learn a whole lot about what you're trying to do.
Using those samples as your tutorial, refer to specific information in the reference docs also available at developer.apple.com. There are specific docs on the classes you'll be using (e.g. UIButton Class Reference), and there are high level guides that talk about different areas, like the Event Handling Guide for iOS, and Drawing and Printing Guide for iOS.
Here are some of the issues you're going to face, and some of the areas that you should read up on:
UIButtons are going to respond to your touch and won't allow any other view to receive that touch without some special handling in your code.
Check out samples that deal with UITouch events, Quartz 2D drawing, creating custom controls
Try doing this without any buttons first, that's fairly simple. Just figure out how to detect a TouchDownInside event, track the finger movement across the screen, and detect a TouchUpInside event, all in a normal UIView. (There may be a sample for this.)
All you ios architects out there, please help me choose architecture/technology for the following iphone/ipad app.
The app itself is a financial app, but we want more of a game look-and-feel of the app, so we probably don't want to use the builtin looks of the cocoa widgets. The elements on the screen will probably be some kind of blob-shaped images.
The app will essentially have five "blob"-shaped areas, spread out evenly across the screen. One of the blobs will be centered and larger than the other ones. Within each blob there will be clickable areas which will pop up "details" and menu-action blobs. These blobs are also graphics objects and must not take over the whole screen. The blobs should animate nicely when popping up. The graphics elements will have a couple of lines of text, which are generated, so the overlaying text itself cannot be part of the static background-image.
The main user interaction will be swiping within the center blob, displaying summaries of the items that are conceptually contained within the blobs underlying data store. Now and then, the user will drag and drop the item to one of the other blobs. While dragging, the item should be traced by a line and when dropping on the other blob, the item should be animated to look like it's being "sucked into" the blob.
Now, what kind of technique would you suggest for this app? Is Cocoa suitable in this scenario? Should I use a game framework like Cocos2D? All kinds of suggestions including example code snippets are most welcome.
I realize that this question might not be as straightforward and to the point as questions generally are on SO, but I hope your answers will come to use by more people than me. Thanks!
EDIT (MY SOLUTION):
I eventually ended up doing everything in UIKit, which was a lot easier than I expected.
Briefly described I used UIButtons with Custom style and an image background, which gave me full control over the visual appearance of the "items". I also found it very useful to manipulate the underlying CALayer of many of my other UIViews. It is often easier than drawing things from scratch using Core Graphics programming.
Another thing that was useful were the UIGestureRecognizer:s. I found them useful for both handling "real" gestures like swiping, longpress etc, but also for handling normal "tap" for UIView classes that aren't subclasses of UIControl. Two examples are UIImage, UILabel and UIView itself. That way I could handle taps for these simple classes. I could for example use a normal UIView, modify it's CALayer to change the look of it completely and still handle taps. Using this technique, I didn't have to subclass any views at all in my app.
The animations were pretty easy too, even though I had to use a non-public method to use "suck" animation, so my app will never pass App Store moderation. It was just a prototype anyway so I don't care.
When this app will be for real, I will probably implement it in HTML5/JavaScript wrapped by Phonegap. The reason for this is mainly reuse of existing mobile web services and also for code reuse across platforms. It will probably also be easier to hook into the existing security solution when using a webapp.
Cocos2d is great if you need to move elements around really fast as it is a layer on top of OpenGLES. I think from what you have said the UIKit will be fine, you get nice animation support, you can do some nice things with UIScrollViews to handle moving elements around etc.
If you need more detailed graphics support and lots of moving elements, particle effects etc then by all means go for Cocos2D but be aware that in Cocos2d the application works more on a scheduled update method, i.e. you get notified every 1/60th of a second to move stuff draw stuff etc, whereas with normal UIKit approach it is more event drive, i.e. I click a button and show a view etc.
We are starting a new game and while I have a few months experience with iPhone SDK, I'm not quite sure the best approach to take for this project.
Basically, our card game requires more real estate than the iPhone screen allows. What we ultimately need is about 480x600 pixels so some of our gameboard will be off the screen sometimes. We will need to be able to take cards from one side of the screen and drag them to another.
For the past few days I've been trying different things, both using cocos2d and other tries using UIKit, but haven't been able to come up with a good solution. I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. A UIScrollView with draggable UIImageViews inside of it seems to be a logical choice but its easier said than done.
Download the free version of the "Words with Friends" app. They use a 2-state zoomable game board with localized zooming and scrolling depending on what you are looking at.
How would that work for your game?