I have my app up and running and would like to add some polish to it. One of the first things I'd like to do is improve the transitions.
Unfortunately I have speent most of my time in OpenGL and still haven't got a solid grasp on working with the UIView system. What is a good way to enter into your App?
I load pretty quickly so I was thinking a quick fade in, but my GL view loads and draws at least a frame before I really get control so I am not sure the best way to go about this.
A quick and dirty way would be to just create a black (or white) solid color full screen UIView overlaying the opengl view, and have it fade its alpha down to zero over some n number of seconds.
There is a SetAlpha method from UIView. In your draw call; decrease gradually the alpha value until 0. When it hits 0, then draw the next "view" of your app (pretty much loads your next 3d objects); and increase the alpha back to 1. should do the trick.
Related
When I draw any shape (Whether it's textured or not) it will flicker when I go to fullscreen and make the title bar show when I move the mouse to the top. It will turn lighter and then back for like a split second. I don't know if this happens with solid colors, but when I color the vertices and draw a gradient or apply textures, this happens. It's annoying, even though it's subtle. How can I fix it?
How to reproduce: Create a shape in Metal, either color the vertices differently to create a gradient, or apply a texture to it, and make the window fullscreen. Move the cursor to the top of the window. When the title bar shows up, the shape/texture will flash briefly. How can I fix that?
I am using macOS 1.15 Catalina.
This can be demonstrated even with the Xcode's example Metal game. Just go to fullscreen, show the title bar, and it will be unsmooth when you show and unshow the titlebar.
UPDATE: I have realized, that if I put the drawing code in viewDidLoad() instead of draw() this behavior will cease. How do I make it so that it's not buggy without having to only render ONE frame?
ANOTHER UPDATE: It does occur for solid colors.
This is a very difficult question, because I don't know what to try. This bug is also very hard to fix, because it only sometimes happens.
Example of the bug (Video)
Another example of the bug that displays the "white flicker" (Video)
Also this question was only half answered, because it turns out that I managed to fix the problem of the titlebar blocking the framerate, but there is still a problem with the white flash.
After watching your video, I understand what your problem is. In your case UI (Tittle Bar) is blocking the main thread, it's normal behavior because MTKView rendering occurs on the main application threads. You need to create a custom metal view and implement a render loop on a background thread.
Your best bet is to report this as a bug to Apple. I tried to research and there seems to be no results about this bug.
I assume you want a fix, but all I got is a workaround:
It doesn't seem to occur while the drawing code only runs once, in viewDidLoad. Maybe you could keep it there, and manually call the MetalView's draw method 60 times a second. I figured out how to get what I said to work. Leave the drawing code in draw, but make sure to set the preferred framerate to 0. Then manually redraw it 60 times a second. Because the draw method auto redrawing is buggy in this sense.
I am developing a game for iPhone and I came across a question whether this can be done using UIAnimation or I have to switch to OpenGL.
If you see the picture above, you can realize there is a rectangle (it will have background image) having many holes in it. User is supposed to touch on holes and initiate the animation. The holes are actually on the image and are not some view. Do you know any article or tutorial I need to read in order to understand this can be done using UIAnimation?
It's more like chess. When you tap a hole, there is a view placed and moved at z-axis and then when you press the other hole, the view is moved to that hole and so on.
I believe it can be done with UIViews too. The holes can be made by using an image with "transparent" holes in it. You can place this UIView on top of a background image(if required). When touches are detected, you can animate another view on top of this view using addSubview:. You can keep this other view outside the screen bounds initially so that the animation seems like a sliding animation.
yes UIView is also an option in your case. if you feel that you will use high quality lots of graphic and will do lots of animation stuff at once on the screen, openGL will be the best or perhaps the gane you are making is a 2d game so you must consider COCOS2D "http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/" for kick starting your game you'll surely get many effects and other glittering stuff with it. and bes of all it is openGL based..!! Performance will be too high for you..!!
Best of luck..!!
I would appreciate some advice on an iphone game design. I want to display some backround image and other images on top of it (buildings, characters etc). The backround is going to be large (up to 10 times the size of the screen) so only a piece of the background file will be displayed at once. The idea is to replace this piece when character gets close to screen borders. I need to make this background transition as a smooth animation. Also, I need to have a zoom in/out feature, preferably animated. Some images on the screen will be static (buildings) and some will require some animation (character walking).
What is the best design:
Use Core Graphics combined with
"sprite" classes - displaying
sprite's UIImage with
CGContextDrawImage
Use UIKit -
create UIImageview to hold every
image and add them as subviews in a
single view appplication
Use OpenGL
ES project
Option 1) turned out to be very slow. It seems like CoreGraphics is not meant to display images in a game loop. But maybe there is a way to make it effecient? Maybe combine it with Core Animation somehow?
Option 2) is my current choice. I am hoping the view to cache the image it holds and thus be more effecient than CG. But will the animation provided by UIImageview will be satisfactory? I think the views shouldn't be added all at once, but rather created & added (removed?) dynamically when background moves. Is it a good idea?
Option 3) would probably give the best control over the images but it seems like quite an overhead. I only need to display images, not vector graphics. Plus I'm new to Mac programming and I don't want to get stuck in some complex technology.
I appreciate any advice, thanks :)
I highly recommend Cocos2D as I've done my own development here on my blog. It was really easy to do. I follow Ray Wenderlich's tutorials and he provides great tools for doing everything you describe.
You asked "The backround is going to be large (up to 10 times the size of the screen) so only a piece of the background file will be displayed at once."
The tiled image system is very powerful and fast performance. If you use google maps you will see and example of a tiled image. Scroll off to a new are and blocks appear. In a local app you could take your image that is 10 times the size of the screen and cut in to tiles that are say 100px by 100px and each screen will only load the tiles that are displayed. When the user moves only the needed tiles are loaded. This saves memory and dramatically improves speed. It is the base reason why tables can fly, only the cells one screen are loaded, as is scrolls off the screen it's memory is reused for the next cell.
If option 2 is sufficiently performant for your needs I would stick with that - it's as easy a system as you'll get on the iPhone and fine for very simple graphics. A related option that might buy you a little bit of speed is using CALayers to implement the graphics. CALayers are almost as easy to use, but are a bit more lightweight than UIViews (in some ways you can think of UIViews as just wrappers for CALayers with additional overhead for managing things like touch events, etc.)
If you're interested I would read the Core Animation Programming Guide (I would provide a link but I think my reputation is too low, but Google should track it down for you). Core Animation is a big subject and can be pretty daunting but if you just use layers (i.e. not the animation parts of it) it's not so bad. Here's a quick example to give you a sense of what using layers looks like:
// NOTE: I haven't compiled this code so it may have typos/errors I haven't noticed
UIView* canvasView; // the view that will be the "canvas" for your game
... // initialize the canvas, etc.
CALayer* imageLayer = [CALayer layer];
UIImage* image = [UIImage imageNamed: #"MyImage.png"];
imageLayer.content = (id)image.CGImage;
imageLayer.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, image.size.width, image.size.height);
imageLayer.position = CGPointMake(100, 100); // NOTE: Unlike UIViews CALayers have their origin at the center
[canvasView.layer addSublayer:imageLayer];
So basically it looks a lot like working with views but with some added performance (and occasional headache).
P.S. - One thing to keep in mind is that if you make changes to a layer's property that is animatable (e.g. position, opacity, etc.) Core Animation will implicitly animate it (e.g. if you write imageLayer.position = somePoint; the layer animates to that position rather than having it's position set immediately. There's easy ways to work around that but that's a topic for another question/answer.
I'm trying to place a red tint on all the screens of my iPhone application. I've experimented on a bitmap and found I get the effect I want by compositing a dark red color onto the screen image using Multiply (kCGBlendModeMultiply).
So the question is how to efficiently do this in real time on the iPhone?
One dumb way might be to grab a bitmap of the current screen, composite into the bitmap and then write the composited bitmap back to the screen. This seems like it would almost certainly be too slow. In addition, I need some way of knowing when part of the screen has been redrawn so I can update the tinting.
I can almost get the effect I want by putting a red, translucent, fullscreen UIView above everything. That tints everything red within further intervention on my part, but the effect is much "muddier" than results from the composite.
So do any wizards out there know of some mechanism I can use to automatically composite the red over the app in similar fashion to what the translucent red UIView does?
I managed to somewhat make this work but with some side-effects:
I setup a UIView on top of all my app-views (attached to the window) which is not userInteractionEnabled and which is opaque
This UIView carries some custom drawRect-method which first fills the complete area with red color and then after having made a "screenshot" of my window-viewhierarchy I am rendering this image with
CGContextSetBlendMode( c, kCGBlendModeMultiply);
to the UIView.
To constantly update this UIView to the current state of the apps UIViews I constantly produce "screenshots" and render them as fast as possible.
I setup an NSTimer which is doing this snapshotting/rendering in a defined frequency and which is added to the the NSRunLoop for "Tracking".
RESULT: some really laggy response from the UI with several fancy effects, but still usable though if you do not set the frequency of snapshotting/rendering to high.
See screenshot here...
The result looks okay, but the usability really suffers a lot. I had a look at the OpenGL-examples before trying this aproach, but OpenGL is a whole lot of different (mostly C) code which seems to be very near to the hardware and which gives you a real headache.
So, the described approach is what I will shoot for with my next app. I hope Apple accepts it even though it degrades UXP during nightvision mode. They should simply make CALayer filter-backed then my problem will definitely be solved a whole lot better and performing nicely.
You could try this: subclass UIView. Add code to -drawRect method to draw the overlay. Make your UIView subclass pose as UIView everywhere in your app with
class_poseAs ([CustomUIView class], [UIView class]);
Currently, I have a UIView subclass that "stamps" a single 2px by 2px CGLayerRef across the screen, up to 160 x 240 times.
I currently animate this by moving the UIView "up" the screen 2 pixels (actually, a UIImageView) and then drawing the next "row".
Would using multiple CALayer layers speed up performance of rendering this animation?
Are there tutorials, sample applications or code snippets for use of CALayer with the iPhone SDK?
The reason I ask is that most of the code snippets I find that demonstrate simple examples of CALayer employ method calls that do not work with the iPhone SDK. I appreciate any advice or pointers.
Okay, well, if you want something that has some good examples of CA good that draws things like that and works on the phone, I recommend the GeekGameBoard code that Jens Aflke published (it is an improved version of some Apple demo code).
Based on what you are describing I think you are doing somthing way more complicated than it needs be. My impression is you want basically a static view that you are animating by shifting its position so that it is partially off screen. If you just need to set some static content in your drawRect going through layers is not going to be faster than just calling CGFillRect() with your color. After that you could just use implicit animations and the animator proxy on UIView to move the view. I suspect you could even get rid of the custom drawRect: implementation with a patterned UIColor, but I honestly have not benchmarked the difference between the two.
What CALayer methods are you seeing that don't work on iPhone? Aside from animation features tied to CoreImage I have not noticed much that is missing. The big thing you are likely to notice is that all views are layer backed (so you do not need to do anything special to use layers, you can just grab a UIView's layer through the layer accessors methos), and the coordinate system has a top left origin.
In any event, generally having more things is slower than having fewer things. If you are just repeating the same pattern over and over again you are likely to find the best performance is implementing a custom UIView/CALayer/UIColor that knows how to draw what you want, rather than placing visually identical layers or views next to each other.
Having said that, generally layers are lighter weight than views, so if you have a lot of separate elements that you need to keep logically separated you will find that moving to layers can be a win over using views.
You might want to look at -[UIColor initWithPatternImage:] depending on exactly what you are trying to do. If you are using this two pixel pattern as a background color you could just make a UIColor that draws it and set the background.
What CALayer methods are you seeing that don't work on iPhone?
As one example, I tried implementing the grid demo here, without much luck. It looks like CAConstraintLayoutManager and CAConstraint are not available in QuartzCore.h.
In another attempt, I tried a very simple, small 20x20 CALayer object as a sublayer of my UIView's layer property, but that didn't show up.
Right now, I have a custom UIView of which I override the drawRect method. In drawRect I grab a context and render two types of CGLayerRefs:
At "off" cells I draw the background color across the entire 320x480 canvas.
At "on" cells, I either draw a single CGLayerRef across a grid of 320x480 pixels (initialization) or across a 320x2 row (animation).
During animation, I make a UIImageView clip view from 320x478 pixels, and draw a single row. This "pushes" my bitmap up the screen two pixels at a time.
Basically, I'd like to test whether or not using CALayer will accomplish two things:
Make my rendering faster, if CALayer has less overhead than what I'm doing now
Make my animation smoother, by letting me transition a layer up the screen smoothly
Unfortunately, I can't seem to get a basic CALayer working at the moment, and haven't found a good chunk of sample code to look at and play with.