I'm currently creating a game in Xcode that will include a decent amount of animations. Would it be extremely inefficient for me to do those animations using CoreAnimation, and will there be a memory issue if there are too many pictures?
I'm wondering if I need to switch to Cocos2d so that I can use sprite sheets and other tools. The game has a strong focus on sound effects as well.
Thank you
If game then not use UIKit.
UIKit isn't exactly fast when it comes to rendering lots of animated images. A game engine is certainly going to be a better choice for almost any game.
Related
I have seen some similar questions asked but no definitive answer.
I have a background image that I'm using for my main menu for a cocos2d game. I plan to have it animated but not sure what is the most efficient way to do this. One idea was to have multiple images to create the animation but I was thinking this may take up too much memory as each image would be quite big.
The other idea was having one background image as a sprite and then having child sprites of that image that are animated with ccaction. The only thing is I may not be able to create such an elaborate animation if I do this.
I just wanted to get some feedback on this to see what would be the best approach.
Thank you,
Making a frame-by-frame animation of the whole screen would make your app size litteraly explode.
You should definitely go with your 2nd idea, i.e have different sprites for each animated component and use actions to animate them.
Check out CocosBuilder: it provides a nice UI for designing such complex animations
I am trying to develop an 2D game using cocos2d library. I am still learning the framework.
Please understand that I am new to game development but not new to programming using objective c.
Here is the issue I am facing when it comes to my game development effort - I feel that I am missing the theoretical understanding of how to develop an infinite scrolling game. Is it possible for any of you to provide me some guidance on that ?
Here is my understanding of achieving infinite scrolling using cocos2d framework:
Cocos2d has a singleton director class which handles the current scene and scene transitions
In the current scene, I feel like I have to create an platform object consisting of several images and add them as a child to the current layer. And constantly run a move action to the platform sprite. So as and when I detect a particular image is off screen I have to replace it with another image. That way I will be able to create an infinite scrolling.
I am sorry if point 2 is not coherent. I just attempted to put my understanding of how to infinite scrolling.
Can you please help me with this ?
Thanks
I dissected how to implement scrolling with cocos2d-iphone in this article. What you probably want is the "fake scrolling" approach where two background images are moved and switch position after one completely left the screen.
You want to do this for the background layer only, not individual sprites. Your world isn't really moving, it's just the background panning that creates the illusion of movement. All sprites etc (player, enemies) movement is still relative to screen coordinates.
You'll find a working implementation in the code for my Learn Cocos2D 2 book in the Shoot'em Up project.
If you don't want to bother implementing this yourself, KoboldTouch supports endless/infinite scrolling for tilemaps. Here the game objects actually move along with the background infinitely (up to the maximum coordinates supported by float which is around +/- 16 million points).
Was looking into making a game with Qt and was wondering if QML has gotten to the point yet where it could be used as a serious tool on the desktop. Have seen some post from Qt stating that they will be transitioning most things to QML eventually, so this seems like it may be the way to go, at least according to Qt.
Edit: I realize that QML probably wouldn't be the best bet for a 3D game with heavy graphics. Was looking more for something that did mostly 2D stuff like a platformer type game.
Seen this http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/08/12/a-guide-to-writing-games-with-qml/. So its obviously possible to some extent. I have also seen some impressive games made solely with java script, which I believe is the base of QML. I was just curious as to what would be the best way to go with Qt at the moment since things have been changing lately...
It may depend on "how long" you want to wait before releasing your game.
The Trolls/Qt are re-doing its "graphics stack" right now: Rather than historic "every-widget-renders-itself" (which is the wrong paradigm for games and rich mobile apps), they are re-implementing to a single graphics stack that renders the WHOLE interface, where the "widgets" themselves are mere data-sets that feed into the rendering. In short, the goal is to make desktop/mobile applications with the exact same performance as the high-end games have done for decades (with their own graphics stack that looks nothing like the typical X/Xlib/Motif/Xvt/Win/MFC/Qt applications graphics stack). Further, the Qt5 plans (in planning/development now, they claim a release sometime next year) are reliant upon OpenGL for this graphics stack implementation.
After this work, the pipeline will be: Widgets==>QML==>(C++ Graphics Stack)==>Hardware. Currently (Qt 4 and previous) it is: QML==>Widgets==>(C++ Graphics Stack)==>Hardware.
You can google for various posts/discussions on this, or here's a long-ish presentation that talks about these efforts: http://qt.nokia.com/developer/learning/online/talks/developerdays2010/tech-talks/performance-do-graphics-the-right-way/
IMHO, QML makes more sense for games, since the interface components are "independent actors" (e.g., not tied to each other through layouts). That's also why QML makes so much more sense for mobile (where real estate is a premium), and for very flashy desktop apps (although it is still relatively young and unproven for that).
QML already has lots of rendering/animation options, but they are mostly a very rich 2D (but with which you could simulate 3D pretty well). The QML 3D is undergoing heavy revision right now, but the new stuff looks really good (and sits on OpenGL). So, if you want heavy 3D, it might be experimentation time for the moment, until you see the new Qt5 interfaces and can take advantage of the hardware acceleration (depending on how much 3D you need).
The performance specs I've seen from the new Qt5 stuff with the new graphics stack (in prototype development) are quite impressive, so much so that I've been thinking about writing some games in QML just to play with it. If this were twelve-months-from-now (or so, after the release of Qt5), I'd bet QML would be the best/easiest decision for games (because the components are independent actors, it's so simple to use, and I'd push all the game-specific heavy stuff into C++, which is really easy to do with QML on top).
QML is definitely a viable option for designing 2D games and can save you a lot of time and lines of code.
V-Play (v-play.net) is a cross platform 2D game engine based on Qt/QML with many useful V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more (API reference).
If you are curious about the games made with V-Play, here is a quick selection of them:
Squaby: a tower defense game
Chicken Outbreak: a platformer like Doodle Jump
Blockoban: puzzle game
Crazy Elephant: a game similar to Angry Birds
Snowball Mania: multiplayer action game
Blitzkopf: brain game
Remember that QML is only designed to lay out the UI. Fundamentally, it acts as a QGraphicsView with lots of utility functions (code in QML is at least three times shorter than the Qt/C++ equivalent, at least, that's how I felt it)
The core of the application is still handled by either javascript files (if things are not too complex) or C++/Qt files (if you want the full extent of Qt possibilities)
As Jeremy Salwen said, for a game that looks like a smartphone app game (big sprites that move with nice transitions, with simple logic behind it), then QML is more than sufficient.
But if you want something complex, then you will end up using in QML only QDeclarativeItem classes that you will have previously defined in C++. Not that useful.
I am currently planning a little sightseeing-app (game) for my iPhone. It should be something like geocaching with Augmented-Reality features. The user should search and then pick up virtual elements. These elements should be "stored".
Would you recommend using cocos2D for this? I am a programmer with no iPhone programming experience ;-)
Thanks
I think this depends on some of the deeper technical requirements of your game. Cocos2D is great, I have been using it for several months now and have little to complain about with it.
You mention "augmented-reality" features which to me says using the camera while overlaying annotations on top of the camera display. Is that right? I could see Cocos2D being used as a transparent overlay over the camera display where you markup various parts of the display. It would be a bit of a challenge no doubt to make sure your annotations match up with what is shown in the camera but I think it could be done.
Best to do a quick tech demo and see if that meets your needs.
So, I'm going to develop a Pac-Man clone with Qt. The problem is that I do not really know where to start.
I quickly take a look at the documentation and some demo. I also downloaded some game sources on qt-apps.org. And it seems that there is a lot of ways to develop a game with Qt!
In your experience, which part of Qt should I consider to develop a Pac-Mac clone ?
The Animation Framework
The Graphics View Framework
The Paint System
Qt Declarative
Any help would be appreciated.
I think that QGraphicsView framework is the best way. Create a QGraphicsScene, some QGraphicsItems for the elements of the game. You have collision detection for free.
Most of KDE games are based on the QGraphicsView framework. It is a good fit for simple game development.
I'm currently working on a project providing gaming-specific Qt Quick Components for cross-platform game development, might be of interest: http://v-play.net :)
At the very minimum you will want to look at QGLWidget. You can get an OpenGL program up in a few minutes by deriving from QGLWidget, it will create the window, context, handle mouse and keyboard input, etc. Create a QTimer to trigger updateGL() every 10-15 ms or so and your good to go. I think there is a demo somewhere for setting this up, but it has been awhile since I saw it.
If you want to embed widgets into the window, I would look at QGraphicsView. There is a demo of this called boxes. Just beware the demo is a tad hard to learn from as several classes are thrown into the same file and it might take a few moments of tracing to figure out where the flow is.
Since you are doing a 2d game, you might want to look at using QPainter on top of OpenGL. This allows you to draw primitives easily instead of doing them with OpenGL calls. I never could get this to stop flickering in fullscreen though.
There's a book about game development in Qt here, it's a bit old, but it might give you some ideas. But IMHO, Qt is widget based and is a bit slow for a game, you might consider using SDL or OpenGL.
I'm developing a simulation of rigid bodies with Qt and OpenGL using the PhysX API from Nvidia. If you want to see this approach, look at my project at github: http://github.com/lucassimao/Simulacao-Estereologica
Well, one place to look could be the Gluon game development framework, which is currently under development. It depends on what you're really aiming for with your PacMan clone, but Gluon may well be what you're after: https://github.com/KDE/gluon
If anyone else is interested in learning how to make GAMES using C++ and Qt, have a look at my YouTube tutorial series. It explains the graphics view framework through a series of videos which build upon a single game that we start in tutorial 1.
C++ Qt Game Tutorial 8 - Adding Graphics
If you are not comfortable with Qt yet, then I REALLY loved VoidRealm's Qt tutorial series, also on youtube (C++ Qt 1 - Introduction to QT programming).
A good start would be:
Qt Examples And Tutorials
Perhaps if you need to cheat you may want to look here
xpacman.tar.gz