I am just a beginner in game developing. Right now I am developing a game using Apple's Sprite kit and found out that the best way to position nodes on the scene is to provide percentages of width and height of the window boundaries as it makes sure all the nodes maintain their positions almost regardless of change in device display size. Using pixels to position nodes is not a peculiar idea as with the change in device display size of iPhone, nodes are either cut off or the scene squeezes leaving empty space around the scene boundary. I have watched how Apple recommend using scene editor but my issue is, using scene editor it allows you to position nodes by choosing pixels and not relative to to scene width or height. Am I making a mistake in understanding the scene editor capability. If I position all my nodes using scene editor as its saves a lot of time, how can I avoid problem with different iPhone sizes. I appreciate your help.
This is an age old problem, from all media formats.
You must decide, personally, what your favourite and most desirable target device is, and then make choices best for both it, and your creative process.
After making that decision you'll have to make your own decisions on how compromised you become on other devices, or how much you compromise your creative and production processes to benefit other device sizes and aspect ratios.
It's a balancing act.
And I strongly suggest favouring your favourite device and putting off all consideration of adaptation to other devices until after you've made something great.
Others will disagree.
Related
Cocoa uses a drawing system (user coordinate space) measured in "points" which are resolution independent...sounds great
While we need to be concerned with our app running in many resolutions, Cocoa is going to take care of that for us in (1) above...sounds too good to be true!
It does scale our controls as resolution changes...this is good.
BUT the screen size increases as my resolution increases...this is not good, I though we had a drawing canvas that was independent of the resolution!
What if the controls shrink to silly small levels as the resolution increases - should I be concerned about this?
To summarize: is their a "standard" resolution I should design for and then all automatic scaling by Apple will automatically look fine?
[Confused while reading the Apple Progammer Guide on the topic of Drawing]
You do not need to be concerned about this. The user is only allowed to select resolutions which make sense given the physical size of the display, so the standard controls will always be "large enough". You just need to test your app on Retina and non-Retina displays (and ideally both at the same time, with an external 1x monitor plugged on a 2x machine ; move your windows between the two screens and check that your images update accordingly).
i developed a game for the iphone4. Now i got problems with the iphone5 and the 4inch screen. My game is on the left side of the 4inch screen and i have a big black border on the right side. But the buttons from the game are in the middle of screen, they have same position like on the iphone4. I checked everythin but i dont know why the background-images and the sprites are on the left side and the buttons are in the middle. I want that everything is in the middle or on the left side. It would be great if anybody could help me!! Thanks!!
COCOS2d-iPhone:
If you're using the latest beta, the only change you should need to
make is export all your images at twice the size and use the "-hd"
suffix, similar to Apple's "#2x". The documentation also says you need
to set the content scale factor of the director.
You can find the documentation here.
and more detail here.
COCS2d-X:
Cocos2D-x has a very easy solution for multi-resolution problem.
In fact you just need to set your DesignResolution and then just imagine your target device will has this resolution.
If target device really has this resolution ( or some other but with same ratio) cocos2d will handle to fix screen and your game looks same in all devices.
And when ratio of target device is different, you have many option ( as cocos2d language, policy) to manage that.
For example if you use Exact fit policy, cocos2d will force your game ( and design) to fit target device screen (without that black boarder).
Exact fit
The entire application is visible in the specified area without trying
to preserve the original aspect ratio. Distortion can occur, and the
application may appear stretched or compressed.
For more detail just take a look at this link : http://www.cocos2d-x.org/projects/cocos2d-x/wiki/Multi_resolution_support
What is the best way to make sand particles animate in a view?
Essentially, I would like to half fill the iOS device's screen with small sand-like particles, then allow a user to rotate and shake the device to dictate the sand's position.
Assuming I have never done any physics programming before, can anyone recommend a tutorial or show me how it's done?
Thank you,
Query.
UPDATE:
I have now come across this (mine should be 2D though) - how can I bring something similar into my app?
Using spatial indexing for finding the nearest-particles to check for collision and using an integration technique for the transition between force(acceleration)-velocity-position and using only gravity force as an outer-fource would give you your sand-box.
You will need to select a good exclusion-force derived from a particle-potential if you use post-collision detection.
I advise you to use the Truncated Lennar-Jones potential and Verlet-Integrator. Easier than Runge-Kutta's and more precise than Euler's. Because it is used in molecular-dynamics. You dont need to use other forces . Just use exclusion force, gravity and wall forces.
If you have bullets in your simulator, you can use Euler-Integration for them. I think this is acceptable for free-falling but not colliding sand particles. After they close each-other, it would be good to use Verlet or Runge-Kutta.
All i mentioned above assumes your integration step is so big that energy is not conserved and even decreased. If your integration is good enough to conserve energy, you will need to give your particles friction force to make sands slow or you will get your particles exploding everwhere.
If you like to make it on iphone then you have to think of certain optimizations and tricks as iPhone can't really simulate water or sand.
Your trick is that most of your work is to draw scene.
Create scene in Box2D with balls at size 10-20 times bigger then sand particle.
iPhone would be able to simulate it.
Then you should draw 10-20 sand particle per ball.
Every frame you may check if ball collides with other balls or not.
If balls is not colliding then these sand particles are in the air and you should draw them on certain distance one from each other.
If ball collides with other balls then particles should be rendered together
You may also detect margin and render glider sand border on top.
I have a BSP tree for depth sorting in an isometric game (I've tried countless other methods) it's seems to be close, but in my game I cannot split the assets. So, items that intercept the current plane, I simply add them to both the "behind" and "ahead" nodes (as suggested in http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis568/presentations/bsp-techniques.pdf).
When I traverse the tree (from lowest depth to highest), I only render the sprite once (the first time I approach it) but this seems to be placing some sprites too low in the display order.
Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated. This is in (mostly) C for iOS, btw.
Thanks in advance (and I try to answer some questions on here, but y'all are so darn fast!).
I don't think a BSP tree will help you sort out the (literal) sprite sorting issues prevalent in isometric tile rendering. Especially if you have archways like doors, there will always be a point where the character just pops under/above the archway. BSP trees help sort visible areas in a 3D world quickly, but an isometric map is a 2 dimensional, layered view where other effects like size of individual tile images play a larger factor than position in space.
The most common solution is in fact to split the assets in order to render individual parts of an archway (or any larger isometric object) either in front or behind the player, depending on each part's distance to the camera.
The alternative is to add blocking so that the player and other objects can never get too close to areas where sprite rendering normally fails due to sorting issues. But that only works if it is built-in from the start (size of tiles, size of world collisions).
I'm developing an iPhone Cocos2D game and reading about optimization. some say use spritesheet whenever possible. others say use atlassprite whenever possible and others say sprite is fine.
I don't get the "whenever possible", when each one can and can't be used?
Also what is the best case for each type?
My game will typically use 100 sprites in a grid, with about 5 types of sprites and some other single sprites. What is the best setup for that? guidelines for deciding for general cases will help too.
Here's what you need to know about spritesheets vs. sprites, generally.
A spritesheet is just a bunch of images put together onto one big image, and then there will be a separate file for image location data (i.e. image 1 starts at coordinate 0,0 with a size of 100,100, image 2 starts at coordinate 100,0, etc).
The advantage here is that loading textures (sprites) is a pretty I/O and memory-alloc intensive operation. If you're trying to do this continually in your game, you may get lags.
The second advantage is memory optimization. If you're using transparent PNGs for your images, there may be a lot of blank pixels -- and you can remove those and "pack" your texture sizes way down than if you used individual images. Good for both space & memory concerns. (TexturePacker is the tool I use for the latter).
So, generally, I'd say it's always a good idea to use a sprite sheet, unless you have non-transparent sprites.