Cocos2d CCLabelBMFont how to add a background to string - cocos2d-iphone

I am wondering how can I add a border & background to labels generated via CCLabelBMFont class in cocos2d.
I don't want to use sprites because my labels are generated on the fly and will keep changing and the size of labels are also different.
Also, I want user to touch and move these labels across the screen. When user picks a label it wiggles a bit like in free air. In that case, I wish to keep low complexity and preserve memory and cpu calculations.
Anyone knows best ways to achieve this?
IOS app LetterPress has similar effects.

Create your own class, that will incapsulate creation of complex node.
It will have several layers, for example, the first layer can be simple CCLayerColor of given rect with zOrder -2, the next layer will be your CCLabelBMFont with zOrder -1 and then you can overload draw method to draw border over your control. All that you draw in this method will be drawn with zOrder 0.
Then you can encapsulate any effects in this class. For example, you can rotate it a bit with method pick, etc. Whatever you want.

Related

Selecting different regions of a worldmap

In cocos2d for iPhone, how can I turn a selected portion of the screen into a menu item with selector functionality?
Imagine a worldmap with curved borders between different regions. When the player touches one of these regions, there should be a selector / callback for it. Sort of like a standard menu, but without making a label or an image selectable. Instead, what I want is to be able to specify the clickable area manually.
How about making a CCLayer that will contain this custom region? CCLayer already implements the touch delegates, and you could easily start capturing the regions by setting self.isTouchEnabled to true.
Define the areas of your world map manually, ideally as rectangles for polygons you'll need to look up polygon intersection test. Then just use CGRectContainsPoint with all rectangles and the touch point. If the touch is inside a world area, run whatever code needs to run.

Cocos2D - Large Image

Is it possible to use a large image in Cocos2D, and allow, via swiping or pinching, for the user to zoom in and out?
I see from this post, that the max res for a Cocos2D image is 2048x2048. That is obviously larger than a device viewport, so I want the user to be able to move around the image.
I'm not creating a game, I'm making a sort of interactive biological cell, that will allow the user to tap arbitrary organelles, and see a popup of information about them.
Here is an idea of what the image will be, and obviously cramming the whole thing into a device viewport is not possible:
So really, before I delve too deep into this project, I'm just curious as to whether it is possible to use a large image, that allows the user the ability to arbitrarily move it around, and, if I can detect organelle touches, perhaps via CCSprites?
I recommend subclassing CCSprite and using your large image as the class's image. CCSprites certainly can detect touches by simply adding the basic CCTouchDispatcher delegate to the sprite's class:
[[CCTouchDispatcher sharedDispatcher] addTargetedDelegate:self priority:-1 swallowsTouches:YES];
Then also add this method to your CCSprite subclass:
-(BOOL) ccTouchBegan:(UITouch *)touch withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
You can do anything you want with the touches at this point, scroll or whatever suits your needs.
You could break up your image into many multiple sprites and use a CCLayer to manage touches instead, it just depends on whether you really need your image to be that large, or if the limitations for a single image are enough for you to work with, considering they are pretty large too. My method here is a lot less complicated than that.
The max texture size is limited by OpenGL ES not just coscos2d and it changes by device. However, you can load the image into more than one texture and then position and move those textures around the screen. So really you could have the appearance of an image any size you would like but programmatically you will have to manage the different sprites (tiles) of the image.
CCSptites don't detect touches. CCLayers have will get the touch events you can then do a hit test to see if it hits a givcen CCSprite.

How to change touch priority on overlapping sprites

Is there any way to change the touch priority for cocos2d iOS sprites? What I have are multiple cards on the screen and they are arrayed in an arc, just like it would when you hold them in your hands. So in this setup, they overlap, and I need to recognize on which card the touch was made. I could measure the coordinates of each vertex of cards and determine the visible area of a card and then check if the touch was made inside that area (couldn't I?) but I thought there would be an easier way to deal with this, say changing the touch priority? Which means that the card closest to the screen would have the highest priority and it'll keep decreasing along the way into the background, so that even if the touch was made on 2 sprites at once (the above and below one), it would be registered only on the sprite with higher priority.
Reading on the internet only revealed ways to change the priority for a sprite and layer so that it defines whether the touch was made on the layer or the sprite, but that's not what I want.
As far as I know, by default you get exactly that behavior, the sprites closer (on the z ax) to you have priority. However, I think they pass down the event to the ones behind them as well. So, what i think you need to do is to eat the event when it gets to any of your sprites. To do that, just return NO when overwriting the "touchBegin" method. Hope it helps.

Question regarding image tiling in a QGraphicsView

This is related to one of my other questions.
If I am tiling a large image by creating a separate QGraphicsItem (with the raster data as its pixmap), how do I keep track of the QGraphicsItem's position within the scene? Obviously for raster data, it is important to keep all the tiles "touching" to make a continuous image and they also have to be in the right place so the image doesnt look jumbled.
Does each tile have to have positioning methods that move it in relation to it's neighbors on the top/left/bottom/right? This seems kind of clunky. Is there a better way to make them all move together?
In other words, if I pan the scene with scroll bars, or pick up the image and drag/move it around in the scene, I want all the tiles to also move and stay in the right position relative to each other.
What is the best approach for controlling the layout, which tiles need to be rendered (i.e. only the visible ones), and populating the data only once it is needed? Also, once a tile has been rendered, is the data from it ever dropped, and repopulated from the image file, say if it stays out of view for a while, then comes back later if someone pans to that section?
There are (more than) 2 ways of doing this:
Use QGraphicsItemGroup which
handles grouping of your tile items
for you. It moves, selects, updates
it's group members as if they are
one. I've never used it but from the
doc, it seems to work with typical
applications.
Paint the tiles yourself in the
paint() of one custom item. This
gives you total control on how to
place and draw the tiles while the
item truly acts as one item since it
is, well, one item. This is what I
do.

Coordinate confusion

I subclassed QGraphicsItem and reimplemented paint.
In paint I wrote something like this for labeling the item:
painter->drawText("Test",10,40);
After some time I think It may be useful to handle labeling with seperate item. So I wrote something like this.
QGraphicsTextItem *label = new QGraphicsTextItem("TEST",this);
setPos(10,40);
But two "TEST" drawing do not appear in the same place on screen. I guess difference may be related with item coordinates - scene coordinates. I tried all mapFrom... and mapTo... combinations inside QGraphicsItem interface but no progress. I want to drawings to appear in the same place on screen.
What I miss?
I assume that you are using the same font size and type in both cases. If the difference in position is very small the reason can be the QGraphicTextItem is using some padding for the text it contains. I would try to use QGraphicsSimpleTextItem that is not going to add fancy stuff internally and see if you still have the same problem. The coordinates system is the same one if you use painter or setPost so that is not the problem. If this doesn't help I will suggest to specify the same rect for both to avoid Qt adding it owns separation spaces.