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.
Related
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'm new to IOS development, and want to create something with tiles similar to what you see here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7giaN5T7ww
Since I'm a beginner, I see myself placing a bunch of buttons on the screen and labeling them to how I see fit. Then figuring out how to move multiple "buttons" at once. I was wondering how you think the tiles are created in this program? If not done by a bunch of buttons, could someone show me code to draw a tile with dimensions of 48x48 pixels, then place a letter on the tile?
Also, if you could point me to some helpful resources that would help me develop something along the lines of a project like this, I would most appreciate it. I'm excited and very motivated to learn and master IOS development and consequently objective-c.
My knowledge is limited to what I've learned by watching and coding along to these two YouTube playlists:
http://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston#p/c/640F44F1C97BA581
http://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston#p/c/53038489615793F7
They've been extremely helpful in helping me understand the basics of Objective-C and Iphone development. Unfortunately, it didn't get into drawing and manipulating objects on the screen.
Thanks in advance for your help. I've found this site and its users quite helpful already. :)
I have kind of similar apps in the app store and I used in one case UILabels and in another case UIViews with UIImageViews as subviews. The movement of the labels I have implemented with the methods touchesBegan:withEvent, touchesMoved:withEvent and touchesEnded:withEvent.
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.
I'm creating an interactive e-book for the iPad. This book will contain multiple pages that will consist of a lot of animations (frame and motion animations), transitions,... I was wondering what my development options are, should I use OpenGL, Quartz,...?
I've use UIImageView.animationImages before and found that it had really bad performance. What's the best way to draw frame based animations?
Does anybody have some good pointers to resources on this?
thanks in advance,
Thomas
I guess that depends a bit on what you'll be drawing. If you have a need for 3D, then OpenGL is the way to go, but it doesn't sound like it. I have a feeling Quartz2D is going to be just fine for your 2D drawing needs. I've done drawing with both and they have a very similar API. I think the downside of using all the raw power of OpenGL is that you have then signed up for doing most of the work yourself. I don't recommend attempting to using Core Animation high level APIs to manipulate OpenGL views.
If you do use Quartz2D and "normal" UIViews instead of OpenGL/EAGLView, then you can take advantage the many pre-canned animations Apple already build with Core Animation. This include the card flip left/right, resizing, moving (x/y translation), rotation and the ever popular e-book page curl.
The best example of iBook like custom page curl functionality I could find is this example code from High Caffeine Content. However, you don't have to bring that much math to the table if you just want to use the out of the box Core Animation stuff. The bad performance you may have encountered could have been due to anything, including older/slower hardware. They have revved the graphics chips on the new devices.
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