Determine if Game has been Launched for the First Time - Cocos2d - iphone

I know this is probably very easy, but I want to add sprites in game that tell you have to play the game ONLY on the first launch. If the game is launched a second, third fourth, fifth, time etc. I do not want those instructions to appear again.
Could someone lead me in the right direction or give me an example?
I was thinking of adding a boolean "isFirstLaunch" then putting it in AppDelegate in "applicationDidFinishLaunching" then checking it in my game scene to see if it is true, but I'm not completely sure.
Any help?
Thanks!

Just use the default preferences. If the app doesn't find the file = first time, if the app does find the file = not first time. I did something like this when I was programming LustCalc. Look for NSUserDefaults... something. Sorry I did this a long time ago.
Found this:
Best way to check if an iPhone app is running for the first time
as a side note, if you don't use synchronize, the iphone decide when to store the preferences, usally after a minute or two: if the app quits in the meantime, no preferences get saved. So you should sync only when you quit the app and at exceptional times.

Related

iOS - How to show hints for gestures for iOS app?

I have seen some apps where when you launch them for the first time after downloading (e.g. Chrome app on iPhone), it shows you a list of animated gestures on the screen, kind of giving you a tour of the app.
How do I build one something like that? And how does the app know to launch only for the first time after download and not since then? For the second question, I am guessing a "shown=TRUE" value can be saved inside a PList file and checking the value each time when the app finished launching. But I am more curious about the mechanism involved in creating a guided app tour.
You can use transparent and semi-transparent images with a UIImageView, so you can make up an image with arrows and notes and put over the whole screen. You could fade it out when the user taps.
To know if it's the first time running the app, you should use NSUserDefaults instead of a plist; it's much easier, and you should be app to find a quick tutorial on that fairly easily.
Also, you could check around on this site for controls like this one. I haven't used any of them myself, so I'm not sure how much they differ from a regular UIImageView. They look nice though.

Objects not being released fast enough, causing an app relaunch crash

I have an app where I have 5 sets of animations that I'm storing in an array. The animations get picked to play randomly after a button touch. This is all working perfectly, however I noticed a bug when I quit the app and reopen immediately, I'll see my main view, then it'll jump to my second view that has the animation in it. (This shouldn't happen since you have to tap the main view in order for it to modally swap in the second view. If I interact with it everything works for a few seconds, then it closes with no crash log.
I finally realized that some of the objects must not be getting released fast enough, since if I close the app and wait three seconds, then reopen, everything executes fine.
I didn't want to put down code to show as this is more of a brainstorming question. I'd love any insight that could point me the right way. I changed a lot of my code to get rid of convenience methods and have all my variables defined and then released in my dealloc.
Is there a way to truly tell the app to kill everything on quit? It's not set to run in the background so this is a bit odd. Thanks for your help I'm still new to this and learning!
Alright, after working on this all weekend and doing more research comparing a barebones version of my app to my prerelease version, I traced memory leaks to the Flurry Analytics api that I am using. Apparently I was suffering from the same issue as the post here: App hangs on restart with latest Flurry SDK and ios4 . I resolved this by setting these optional methods to false, since they take extra time to send data after the app terminates, and depending on the connection it takes a few seconds.
FlurryAnalytics.h
/*
optional session settings that can be changed after start session
*/
+ (void)setSessionReportsOnCloseEnabled:(BOOL)sendSessionReportsOnClose; // default is YES
+ (void)setSessionReportsOnPauseEnabled:(BOOL)setSessionReportsOnPauseEnabled; // default is YES
Hope this helps anyone else who experienced something similar to me!
All apps can enter the background by default. Normally they do not do anything there, but they stay there in a frozen state and when you open them again, your program does not restart, it just picks up where it left off.
Anything that's set as an animation delegate might not get released, since it's retained for that purpose until the animation completes.
You can add an applicationDidEnterBackground: method to your app delegate to get informed when your app is going into the background, but exactly what you need to do depends on the design of your app. You can also add applicationWillEnterForeground: to do anything you need to do differently when restarting, as opposed to newly starting.
You might be able to force your animations to complete by starting a new animation with duration 0.0 (or very short if for some reason you can't do that).
If this happens only if your app goes to bkgnd and comes back AND you don't mind if the app restarts everytime it comes back then just put UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend in your app's plist. In all my cases where these and other bad things happen with apps going to and returning from bkgnd this helped.
While you might still see the app on the buttom when double tapping it is really stopped and will restart. Apps that show on the buttom do not always have to run or be stored in the bkgnd I learned.
ps. don't forget to set the value of UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend to YES

IPhone SDK : Start my application from scratch when launched again

Here are my issues,
When I install my application on my test device it has the behaviour I want.
However if I close it with the IPhone main button and restart with the icon, it starts back from the view where I left it, whereas I would like it to restart from my main view controller (my start view).
In the same way, I load some animations with viewDidLoad in certain views. I want them to show only the first time the view is loaded each time the application is launched. Right now animations only works the first time the application is launched after installation, then they don't screen anymore when I launch again the application.
Does anyone have a clue ?
Thank you very much for your help.
(Sorry if this topic is a bit easy for you guys :D, I'm quite new at it !)
No problem about being new! This is happening because, for devices from iOS 4.0 on up, your app will support multitasking by default. To disable this features, Add the key
UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend
to your Info.plist file, and set its value to YES. Good luck!
In addition to Sam's answer above, you can also add a key named:
Application does not run in background and set the value to YES.
Both work fine, however.

iphone MultiTasking?

Hello I'm trying to get the multitasking work properly, but unfortunately I'm kinda lost. My problem is when I re-enter the game, it takes several seconds for the game to come back and show the pause screen. My question is; is there any way to put some sort of loading screen until the game comes back, so I can at least indicate that its not frozen? I've never used Xcode directly. I'm using Unity 3d to build my game. I made a little bit of research and if I'm not mistaken I'm supposed to use "applicationDidEnterBackground" app delegate method. My question is How can I put a custom loading screen using that method in Xcode?
Thanks
In -applicationDidEnterBackground:, you're given the opportunity to "clean up" the UI before the screenshot is taken. Apple says you should remove "sensitive data" (the screenshots might be persisted to "disk"?), but it also lets you do other things. In one app, we hide the label on a countdown timer so it doesn't appear to jump when you switch back to the app.
To change the "loading screen", simply display a full-screen view over the other views and remove it in -applicationWillEnterForeground:. Alternatively, pause the game in the first place!
(Really, you should be pausing the game in -applicationWillResignActive: which happens when the user double-taps home or the user receives a SMS/notification. I'm pretty sure it's called when the app is backgrounded, too.)

App crashes on backgrounding because of SimpleAudioEngine

So I׳m trying to play some effects in my Cocos2D game using SimpleAudioEngine , but after I have added them my app crashes when it goes to background (multitasked).
I searched for this problem in the internet but all the solutions that I found didn't work for me. What I did find out is that this problem happens because my app is somehow trying to play sounds when backgrounded.
In console it shows me (which is the same error I found other people had):
sgx error (background gpu access not permitted):
And another thing, when I run my app on the simulator, or even on my device while debugging carefully (going line-by-line with XCode while the app is running) this doesn't happen.
I just had this issue. I resolved it by having a bool to check if the app is running or in background that I set to true when the app goes to foreground ( applicationWillEnterForeground ) and that I set to false when the app goes to background ( applicationDidEnterbackground ) . So using the bool you can tell if the app is in the background and if it is, I just exit out of drawView function in EAGLView (thus not doing any graphics rendering which was causing the error).
I am a very dodge programmer but that method has worked for me and I hope it works for someone else. I did not need to unload and reload my sounds or anything and my app now has Multitasking XD
I was experiencing this, on about 25% of the occasions that my application re-entered the foreground. Like you, when I removed the sounds, the problem went away. That is how I came across your question here.
I may have found a solution to this. I have made what appears to be an unrelated change, but the problem seems to have gone away. Now, when my app enters the background, I invalidate my main scheduled timer. When my app re-enters the foreground, I then re-schedule the timer (after reloading my sounds, which I completely shut down on entering background).
So far, the problem has not come back. I would be interested to know if this helps.
I just resolved this issue on my end. Here's what was wrong in my case and, from what I can tell from the other answers and comments on this page, many other people's case as well:
By default, when I started my project, CCDirector::sharedDirector()->pause(); and CCDirector::sharedDirector()->resume(); were both being called twice, once by (void)applicationWillResignActive:(UIApplication *) and (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *) respectively in AppController.mm, and once by AppDelegate::applicationDidEnterBackground() and AppDelegate::applicationWillEnterForeground() respectively in AppDelegate.cpp.
Make absolutely sure that these methods are only being called once, in AppController.mm. In AppDelegate.cpp, instead make sure that you are calling CCDirector::sharedDirector()->stopAnimation(); in place of CCDirector::sharedDirector()->pause(); and CCDirector::sharedDirector()->startAnimation(); in place of CCDirector::sharedDirector()->resume();.
Hope that's helpful to anyone else stuck in this crappy situation!
Are you sure it's related to audio? "background gpu access" sounds like it's using OpenGL.
I had the same issue in my application and spent some 4 hours to find out. Going background was OK the first time, but crash application the second time. With a short error message related to OpenGL. I had the same questions: how audio can crash graphics. But it wasn't a question of audio, but a question of notifications...
I discovered that going foreground was creating 2 timers in my custom level meter class.
I had registered UIApplicationWillEnterForegroundNotification and UIApplicationWillResignActiveNotification. Then, going background invalidated only one, since I registered only on notification... That was it!
One need's count its notifications!