What I mean is, do animators work on an animation in say Flash (or some other kind
of key frame animation program) and then export it to the iphone somehow?
For example, say I am an animator and I want to create a person waving for an iphone
game. What type of external program would I use and then what libraries on the iphone
sdk would I use to load them in?
I think it all depends on how in depth you want to get. Making a 2D game is a broad statement. For example, to make what you ask. You would just make a series of PNG images for a cell based animation of the wave. wave1.png, wave2.png, waveN.png...
Then load the PNG images in and then play them in sequence. You can do this with UIImageView, Core Animations classes, or manually your self with UIImages and UIViews.
There a lot of great game engines you can check out too. Here is a link for an example of what is available. Game Engines
For the best performance, most companies/developers use OpenGL to do both 2D and 3D style games. You can utilize a lot of tricks for the textures used in your games.
The iPhone natively supports key frame animation with the CAKeyframeAnimation class.
I think the most popular framework for 2D games is Cocos2D: http://cocos2d.org/
Related
I am going to make a 2D iPad game today, but I do not want to use a game framework. I am more interested in how the framework is created, how to program the physics, and other low level topics.
So, if I'm not using a framework, how do I start? Is the first step to create an OpenGL based app in XCode?
OpenGL would be a place to start, but i would look through the cocos2d source, and see how various things are being done in that.
To program a 2D game from the ground up, especially if you're new to iOS, I don't see any reason to use anything other than the CoreGraphics and CoreAnimation APIs. Any bitmap-based imaging is typically done via OpenGL behind the scenes.
I want to develop 2d game through Cocos2d.but i could not find
any tutorial based on the following.I want one game loop and one draw screen.can I do Multiple sprite animations within one scene..(translating World etc).where can i find tutorial how to use those classes which are coccos2d?
-(void)gameloop
{
calculation();
drawImage();
drawImage1();
}
It is quite simple, you do not have to know opengl essentials to use cocos2d. cocos2d is quite simple yet awesome!. Just download the cocos2d 0.99.5 and it comes with sample tests. You will be able to find almost all of the things you want to do in a game i.e. animations, touches, moving sprites, particle system etc etc
so just go to:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
How to learn OpenGL by example, say, building a rotating globe?
Is there a relatively easy was to include a 3D animation into an iPhone app? We have the animations already made up for another project and our client has asked if they can be placed inside an iPhone app. We could perhaps include a low-res looping video of the animation (it's just a 3D component rotating on a single axis), or would it be better to look into getting the 3D animation directly onto a view?
Cheers,
Dan
You could either split it up into a set of frames and use the UIView animationImages property like so:
http://appsamuck.com/day2.html
Or assuming its already an OpenGL animation you could port the code to openGLES.
Here are good tutorials for openGL ES:
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-table-of.html
I'm going to make a game for the iPhone, and I'm mostly going to be using images. I've read that using Quartz only is slow for actual games with high frame rates, so I was wondering if you guys had any good ideas for using OpenGL for rendering a game scene?
I'm going to be using a lot of images, and I want to be able to freely rotate them.
I've looked at Apple's examples GLSprite and GLPaint, but I don't really see anything I could use.
All I want to do is be able to render images at specific positions, and want to be able to rotate them.
I'm a noob at OpenGL, but I know Quartz.
Take a look at cocos-2d. It uses OpenGL instead of Quartz and supports making the kind of game you seem to want to make:
http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/
On an iPhone:
If I am writing a game that has multiple levels, with multiple animations (image sequences), jpg and png (transparent), some full screen and some not, some looped and some played once only. What is the best way of doing it? Each level might have up to 10MB of images. Add on to this music, and video (cut scenes). All 2D graphics, no 3D models.
Is OpenGL required? Or can this be achieved with Quartz or Core Animation?
I do similar using UIViews and a bit of Core Graphics (Quartz 2D) and it works fine. I've found the custom drawing in Core Graphics pushes it a bit further, tho - UIViews work best when given images rather than having to draw themselves. Also watch out for lots of transparencies. You'll probably find that large or long (many frame) animations will be the killer, though. There are some techniques for minimising the impact of the animations which involves allowing it to purge images from memory if not being immediately displayed (I forget the setting). This may result in your animations not being as smooth as you they would otherwise be (not sure if Open GL ES would help here, though).
You should probably prototype using UIViews, and decide then if it's worth doing the extra work for OpenGL ES. Also, if you're not already familiar with OpenGL/ Open GL ES it's a steep learning curve.
I've used both Quartz and OpenGL to do graphics on the iPhone, and while OpenGL has a much higher learning curve, it gives much better performance than Quartz. Let's say you have a scene that involves drawing 6 large, semi-transparent images on top of each other. Quartz will do it, but you'll probably get 15fps at best. OpenGL takes advantage of the iPhone's PowerVR chip and the drawing is hardware accelerated - so you can load those images into OpenGL textures and render at 25-30fps no problem.
I would agree with Phil though - try doing it using Quartz and see if it meets your needs. OpenGL is extremely powerful but it's API lacks some of the convenience features of Quartz (such as saving/restoring graphics state).
One another note entirely, you might want to take a look at Unity's iPhone development tools (http://unity3d.com/#iphone). They leverage OpenGL but provide you with an IDE to create your game. It abstracts away all of the graphics-level code, so you can focus on the high-level gameplay. My brother uses it to write iPhone games, and it's extremely cool.
I recommend having a look at Cocos2D iPhone.
cocos2d for iPhone is a framework for building 2D games, demos, and other graphical/interactive applications. It is based on the cocos2d design: it uses the same API, but instead of using python it uses objective-c.
Most likely OpenGl.
One advantage of using OpenGL ES would be that the investment of time for learning the technology could be applied to other platforms/contexts and your game is potentially more port-friendly. These may not be important to you.
I would suggest using Quartz. OpenGL ES is really best for 3d stuff. However both work fairly well, so if you already know OpenGL ES, it's fine to use that.
You should consider using a lot of less resources in your game, Apple recommends not to use more than 10 mb in texture for openGL apps.
Try texture atlas, reuse graphics, tile based graphics...but avoid to use to much graphic assets.