I am close to finishing my first cocos2d game. Now I want to make a small movie/story to show when the user launches the game app. The game should first show the 15 seconds story (animated story) like in MonsterShooter, JailBreaker, AngryBirds, or the like. When you tap on the story, it takes you to the main menu.
My question is: What to use to make the story? Other than making an actual scene with lots of animations is there any other tool that I can use to create an animated story and embed it to cocos2d layer?
What you need to do is to make a video, you could try with adobe premiere, final cut, Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, adobe after effects (just to name a few), then to play the video use the CCVideoPlayer from cocos2d-iphone-extensions
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I'm looking to make a sprite animation editor. I have the loading of my custom animation file done but now need to get the actual ui started. I'm really just stuck on what widgets I would use to actually play my animation. I need to be able to go to certain frame, play, pause, loop, etc. Once I'm done with the viewing portion I plan on adding in the editing.
I've seen AnimatedSprite in qt docs but that seems to only allow playback of sprites in the same file. In my situation sprites can be from multiple image files and sometimes doesn't follow a grid like sprite cutter.
First of all, you should decide whether you want to use QML or Widgets. AnimatedSprite is QML related class. All widget-related classes starts with "Q" letter.
If you decide to use Qt Widgets, I would recommend to take a look at Qt Animation Framework in combination with Qt Graphics View Framework. Most likely it will not let you do everything you want out of box, but it should provide you with a rich set of useful tools.
If you need here are some examples.
Hope it helps.
Have a look at QMovie. This class may provide all the methods you need, as long as you only want to use it for viewing. The QMovie can be passed to a QLabel to show the animation.
QMovie however supports only gif out of the box (and there is a third party plugin for apng files). You would probably have to create your own image handle plugin to support your format.
If thats not applicable or to complicated, you will most likely have to create your own custom widget. Have a look at the painter example. Playing an animation is not that hard if you have all the frames. A simple QTimer to change the image to be drawn in a constant rate should work.
What I need to do is create a program that overlays the whole screen and every 30 seconds the screen needs to flash black once.
the program just needs to be on top of everything, doesn't have to work over the top of games, but wouldn't say no if it did!
But i've got no idea where to start. Ideally the solution would be cross-platform for both windows and osx.
Does anybody have any ideas about where I should start or could whip up a quick demo?
OpenGL (you tagged it as such) will not help you with this.
Create a program, that overlays the whole screen,
The canonical way to do this is by creating a decorationless, borderless top level window with some stay-on-top property being set.
and every 30 seconds the screen needs to flash black once.
How do you define "flash back once"? You mean you want the display become visible for one single vertical retrace period or a given amount of time? Being the electronics tinkerer I am, honestly, I'd do this using a handfull of transistors, resistors and capacitors, blanking the analog VGA signal.
Anyway, if you want to do this using software, this is going to be hard work. If you'd do this using the aforementioned stay-on-top window, when you "flash" it away, all the programs with visible output would receive redraw events, which to process would take some time. In the best case scenario the system uses a compositing window manager which can practically immediately show the desktop. Without a compositor its going to be impossible to "flash" the screen.
Ideally the solution would be cross-platform for both windows and osx
A task like this can not be solved cross plattform. There's too much OS dependent work to do for this.
I presume this is for some kind of nerological or psychological experiment. I think doing this using some VGA intercepting circurity would be actually the easier, quicker to implement solution. I can help you with that. But I think there's another StackExchange better suited for this. Unfortunately digital display interfaces (DVI, HDMI and Display Port) use a complex line code scheme, which can not be blanked as easily as VGA, so you must have a computer capable of analog (=VGA) output and a display with a VGA input.
Tools like Fraps work with games based on OpenGL or DirectX but doesn't work with simple Windows 8 Metro style games like "Cut The Rope" or "Pirates Loves Daisies". Yes I know that "Cut The Rope" and "Pirates Loves Daisies" are using different technologies like JavaScript and HTML5 canvas but I'm really curious is it possible to build Fraps like tool for such games (some kind of canvas hack?). I would like to do 2 things:
1. Measure fps.
2. Capture screenshots.
I was reading articles about the whole Fraps concept and intercepting calls to DirectX but I'm not sure if its gonna work with Metro applications. Maybe I'm just wasting my time. I have 2 questions for you guys:
1. Do You think is it possible to build Fraps like tool that works with Metro style applications or games that are NOT using DirectX or OpenGL?
2. Does messing around with dxgi.dll (or other dll) could help somehow?
Thanks
Fraps is able to display the framerate because of hooks it has into DirectX. HTML apps do not provide access to this same information.
I've confirmed that the free program ScreenPresso (http://www.screenpresso.com/) can record Cut The Rope just fine.
Try Intel GPA (graphics performance analyzers)
http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/intel-gpa
Install it and then run the app.
There are a zillion options for graphs and stuff that I don't entirely understand (maybe it will be useful to you). If you want fps, just close the window; the program will continue running in the background.
There should be an icon in the lower right next to battery info and volume control. If you hover over it, it says your IP address. Right click on the icon for GPA and then select "Analyze Application" at the top.
A window will pop up with all the tile apps on the machine. Click on the app (don't double click) and click "run" in the bottom right.
The frame rate and resolution will be displayed in the upper left corner.
Tested and it works for Cut the Rope (I'm getting 58-60 fps). Hope this helps.
I'm new to development and I have played around with a few tutorials. I wonder what the best way to set up a menu for a game with cocos2d?
I want a MainMenu with a Startbutton, SettingsButton, HighScoresButton and a little info/creditsButton in the corner.
How should I set this up?
Should I have the MainMenu as a Scene and the others as layers or just make all of them as separate Scenes?
The buttons that I add, should they be a plain button and then I add the textLabel on top or should I make them complete with textLabel?
I would like the buttons to "wiggle" like it is made of jello when i tap them, how do I do that?
As I said, I am new to this but I wanna learn as much as I can before school starts. I'm currently taking a summer class in iphone development so I get a head start for the next semester. I would like to see experienced game developers to help me out with this since i want to work with that when I get older, if they could also show me how to structure a game and the design.
Thank you so much.
David H
You've got several questions buried in there, so I'll address them in order...
First, to save on memory, you should break sections of your game, including menus, into separate scenes and switch between them using:
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene: yourScene];
Alternatively you can use pushScene: and popScene, but these hold pushed scenes in memory and can be very costly depending on what you've got in the scene.
As for how to design your buttons, that's completely up to you and what fits best with the game. Some games look fine with text buttons. Others need a more stylized button that is best created with images. Remember, a CCMenuItem (button) is just a CCNode, so you can layer images and text in almost any way you wish.
Animating buttons is going to be a manual thing. I suggest subclassing the CCMenuItem, or CCMenuItemImage and overriding the selected and unselected methods to animate the underlying images.
We used cocos2d for our game The Selfish Birdbreeder. You can find the game and source here and dig around. I'm pretty certain we have a main menu.
http://pyweek.org/e/BirdBreeder/
I want to add an animation in starting screen of my game. I did that animation in flash. how to load it in cocos2d
Don't think you're going to be able to do this. Flash has never been able to run on the iPhone/iPod and very likely never will at least for the foreseeable future. Someone would have to write a custom SWF file loader and player specifically for Cocos (no small task). Even then I doubt Apple would allow such an application to be approved. I would suggest converting your SWF to an iPhone/iPod compatible movie format. QuickTime (mov) for sure is supported, mpg and avi may work as well.
There is and will be no Flash support on the iPhone. You'd have to to convert the animation into single images and use cocos2d's animation system.
The thing you wanted four years ago has released! It's called GAF This is library and a converter for flash animations.