I'm using Cocos2D in my project and I'm quite new to this library. And I don't understand one thing.
I have many sprites on the scene which are added and removed constantly. So at certain moment a sprite becomes useless and I have to remove it form a batch node.
In the comments of the removeChild method of CCSpriteBatchNode class is said:
#warning Removing a child from a CCSpriteBatchNode is very slow
Does anybody know what the best method of removing a sprite?
Thanks!
Instead of adding and removing sprites why not re use them, then you won't have any slow down caused by adding or removing sprites.
Setting a sprite not to be visible saves the render cost and when you need to add it again just move it to position and the texture frame if you need to and then turn the visibility back on.
I subclass a ccSprite and then add them to an array to keep track of active and inactive sprites.
Dave.
Related
I have been building a 2D sprite based game for which I want to have the player be able to customize their equipment. This means that although I am fine with drawing the content, I'd need to ensure animations in the game run fine on top of each other. For this, I have been preparing a game object with several children to account for the equipment:
Each of the children runs a single animation and should have to follow the player, which I accomplish by using transform.localPosition = Vector2.zero; on the Update of the script each takes, so they hook to the parent's pivot and follow the player. While this has worked for the most part, there are moments in which all of the objects are not synchronized and as such sometimes the parent object (the body) is seen where it shouldn't since the other game objects should render on top:
Aside from that, to make it easy for the children to follow the parent position I had made sprites which are all the same size, which risks me having to load a lot of transparent space per sprite.
Another problem that I just noticed as I'm trying to address the issue of loading too many useless pixels involves the positioning with other objects such as the Sword game object, which doesn't follow the player fully if I use sprites that are not perfect squares (see this question for details How to align sprites of smaller sizes to a moving gameobject sprite? and this one Sibling sprite doesn't appear to follow main GameObject sprite even when transform.position updates)
I tried to fix this by making the Sword a child of the Hero, but even then changing the position through a function that sets values to add on to transform values of the sword game object only change the position of it relative to the initial value. I attempted changing the pivot of the sword sprites to a custom value to guess where the center of it would align with the main game object and appear in the right position, but even that doesn't seem to work.
I'm kind of getting tired with my current process, as I have to rely on several animations for each of the game objects, both parent and children, so that these obey to different layers in a single animator (or in the case of the sword, a separate animator), all to ensure there is some synchronization that doesn't always occur:
I really don't mind the web that is turning out in what I'm doing, but the fact that I have to repeat it across multiple layers with no real guarantee that all the objects would appear right on top of each other due to the fact of having multiple animations playing, and loading multiple sprites with empty space is becoming more of a chore than enjoyment.
So I think I came up with a possible solution: If I could make a single animation for the whole equipment used at any given point (whether only wearing pants or wearing full equipment), then having this single animation could guarantee synchronization across parent and children without the need for animator layers or special functions to update position or worrying about pivots or square sprites if I can set the position of non-square sprites in the animation, with the downside that I would need to account for every single animation for each possible equipment variation (so if I had even 3 of each sword, pants, boots, etc. that would mean 3^6 animations) and make a more complex web of animator states. The only thing I'd be worried about in this case, however, would be the performance, if having too many animations for a player would affect how fast these load. But at the benefit of eliminating the other problems mentioned, my question boils down to this:
Is it better to have a single game object with animations that change multiple sprites across children game objects and a single animator that chooses states based on multiple variables, or game objects with multiple animations that change a single sprite for each, and a single or multiple animators with multiple layers that choose states based on multiple variables?
There isn't really a set answer for something like this. It really just depends on how good your/the players computer is when playing the game. Sorry if this isn't what you wanted.
I'm using frames (bounding boxes) to disable all game objects within an area when the player is not in that area. I want to know if parallax scripts will affect a disabled frame of objects. I don't want the parallax of background and foreground layers to be off when the player enters a new frame.
Slightly off-topic, but still relevant enough: I'm building the frames to be seemless transitions; is there a way to prevent parallax overlap at the transition point?
Scripts on disabled gameobjects do not recieve Update calls, as you've noticed. There are a few things you can do:
Not disable the entire gameobject when its outside the camera frame, instead only disable the renderer attached. This way your parralax script is still updated. Though its questionable if there are performance benefits to this, Unity does Frustrum culling by default.
Dont have individual parallax scripts, instead have one ParallaxManager in which you register all objects. This manager is never disabled, as an added benefit there is less overhead calling update.
Instead of update start some coroutine on another object, that isnt disabled. For example, in Parallax you can start a coroutine from the Camera gameobject. That way it keeps going, eventhough the parallax is disabled.
Try to calculate the right position in the OnEnable. That way you can still disable objects, and they appear at the right position when they are enabled again.
I'm currently working on a 2D pixel Jump'n'Run. I want the player to be able to "buy" new skins for the player-character. I have multiple sprite-sheets. They all have the same structure. I'm using sprite animations.
How can I change the sprite-sheet at runtime? I found the following solution, but it's very resource intense: https://youtu.be/HM17mAmLd7k?t=1818
Sincerly,
Julian
The reason it's so resource intensive in the video is because the all the sprites are loaded in each LateUpdate(), which is once per frame. The script looks like it's grabbing all the sprites in the sprite-sheet and loading them every frame so that if the spriteSheetName ever changes, it will update the renderer on the next frame.
I don't believe that's necessary and in the video he mentions that it's just being used as an example. What I'd do is move it out of the LateUpdate() method and into its own method that can be called only whenever the user wants to change the sprite-sheet. So instead of mindlessly loading the sprites from the sprite-sheet each frame, you'll only load them whenever the user selects it.
That should accomplish drastically cutting down the intensity of this script because you're not loading all the sprites in a sprite-sheet and looping through each of their renderers on every single frame.
I created a bunch of non-AI animations for enemies that do basic back.forth or up/down motions. Everything was working perfect until I started working on the Boss of the level. The boss has his own tag "Boss" and enemies have their own tag as well. Anyway, the problem is when I click start, every enemy leaves the game board. I can see them animated above the game board still doing their routines.
Any clue as to why this happened and how to fix it? I'd really, really hate to have to scrap all the enemies and start from scratch...
I used the Animation tool inside unity.
Extra Note: I created an EMPTY and moved all of my enemies into that Empty object to clean the hierarchy panel up. The animations were fine before this.
************** Currently Resolved **************
Whew! Okay, so apparently Unity doesn't like it when you move your animated stuff into an empty AFTER being animated. I FIXED them by simply removing them from the EMPTY that I had placed them in. However, I'd still like to know why this is. So any useful resources, links, manuals, personal insight/observations or anywhere I can read up on this would be appreciated!
Here is an explanation what happened:
The moment you dragged them all into the empty GameObject I guess this object probably wasn't placed on 0,0,0 in the Scene.
So Unity automatically changed all the local position values of your enemy items to fit the current position offset to the empty object.
Result: In the editmode they don't change their actual global position in the scene but their local position. This is supposed to happen if you just want to organize stuff.
However, now when you start the game and the animations are played, the animators change all the local positions to whatever is stored in your animations.
Result: all objects jump back to their original localPosition which had an offset to the empty GameObject.
To solve this make sure the empty GameObject is at position 0,0,0 and optimally has rotation 0,0,0 and scale 1,1,1 before you drag anything into it.
Easiest way to achieve that is by clicking reset in the empty objects Transform component before starting to drag stuff into it.
Question:
In the realm of cocos2d for iPhone, what's the equivalent of UIKit's -viewDidAppear callback for CCLayer?
*And if no equivalent exists (as seems to be the case in the docs), what's your recommended way knowing when a CCLayer has been rendered?
There are these two methods which are quite similar to
- (void)onEnter;
- (void)onEnterTransitionDidFinish;
Well, a CCLayer is rendered, usually, when it is created and you add sprites to it. You should do all this up front before the game play begins. Then you can move the layer around and animate its objects without worrying about "when" it will be finished rendering (usually).
Scenes are a different matter. A scene is what sets up the layers and creates them, loads images, sprites, etc, and tha can take a bit. For that you have a few options. One effective option is the the onEnter and onExit family of methods. However, another really good way is to simply have an intermediate scene, such as a mostly empty, lean Loading CCScene that you load, and then that scene loads the big scene you are trying to load. When you do this, you are freeing up old memory before adding new memory.
It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your equivalent of viewDidAppear.