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/
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'm developing an application with C++ and GTK3 but I'm stucked. I've created a visual application with glade which has three columns and one of them, the middle one, is a DrawingArea. In that DrawingArea I want to draw some circles at the point I want to after pressing a button and have different mouse events on that circles (like drag and drop, double click, right click...). I've made the first thing (draw a circle after pressing a button) following the official documentation, but the problem is that I don't know how to do the mouse events, but I thought about it and I have some different solutions (I don't know if they are the bests solutions or maybe there are better):
I think the best way is to create a signal to the cairomm context, but I didn't see anything to do that. Maybe the way would be to create a cairo surface or something like that.
Every time I click to create a circle, I would have to create a gtk widget in which I can handle mouse events. The problem here is that the widget needs to have circular shape and need to be drawable. Is it possible to create a circular DrawingArea? It could be the best. I saw the way to create custom widgets here.
Use goocanvasmm. The problem here is that goocanvasmm has a little documentation (I'm sorry I can not post more than two links because of my reputation) and I think this is not the best solution, I prefer to use cairomm.
This application was written in C using GTK2, and the circles were drawn using gnomecanvas, adding signals in an easy way to each circle; and now I'm moving this application to C++ and GTK3 to renew it.
I'm very new to GTK (and graphical interfaces in general), but I looked for solutions for hours and I don't know what is the best way in order to continue my work.
Thank you for your help :)
It's best to use a canvas library for this such as GooCanvas. Doing it with cairo alone would require you to listen to mouse events on the whole drawing area, and keep track of where the circles were in order to decide which circle the mouse event belongs to - exactly the problem which the canvas library has already solved for you.
If you are having trouble with goocanvasmm documentation, a look at the documentation for GooCanvas' C API combined with knowledge of how the C API translates into C++ will usually suffice. Although the GooCanvasmm documentation seems fairly extensive to me.
I have a CCSprite that I'm using in a scene and have created multiple CCAnimation actions to apply to it all using a single CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache. While everything is working and I'm able to switch between animations, I feel like I'm doing poorly and would like to simplify my code by retrieving the running action(s) on the CCSprite to stop them individually before running the next action on it.
To help create some context, lets assume the following situation:
We have a CCSprite called mySprite
We have 3 separate CCAnimation actions defined for walking to the right, walking to the left, and sitting looking forward called: actionAnimWalkRight, actionAnimWalkLeft, and actionAnimSitForward respectively.
We want to have the sprite walk to the right when someone touches the screen right of mySprite, walk left when someone touches the screen left of mySprite and sit when someone touches mySprite.
The approach I'm using to accomplish this is as follows:
Place CCSprite as a child in the scene.
Tell the sprite to run an action using: [self runAction:actionWalkRight];
When I want to change the action after someone touches, I have a method called stopAllAnimationActions which I call before I apply a new action that stops any animation action no matter what's running. Basically lists ALL the CCAnimation/CCActions I have defined and stops each one individually since I don't want to use stopAllActions. as follows: [self stopAction:actionWalkRight]; [self stopAction:actionWalkLeft]; [self stopAction:actionSitForward];
Then I apply the new animation after the above method fires using: [self runAction:actionWalkLeft];
While this works, it just seems like a poor design to stop items that I know aren't running just because I don't know exactly what is running. So just looking for advice and the best recommended practice to do something like this within very complex situations so tracking every possible situation is difficult. Any feedback would be appreciated.
When creating the actions set the tag of that action with a constant:
actionWalkRight.tag= kCurrentAction;
[self runAction:actionWalkRight];
Then, retrieve the running action by that tag and stop it.
[self stopActionByTag:kCurrentAction];
I recommend you simplify your process and take advantage of the native Cocos features, including stopAllActions. Don't re-use actions, always create them from scratch as it has been well discussed among Cocos developers that re-using actions can be buggy.
Cocos is well optimized and features like stopAllActions are not performance hogs. It would probably be faster than your approach, actually.
Sorry for my bad english, i'm from Italy XD
I have done frogger game with a simple graphic choice: a gridlayout with a lot of updating labels. It works perfectly. I could set icons instead of label, but now I want to wear it with some better, and my teacher told me to choose from QGraphicScene + Item + View, or QPainter + QWidget::paintEvent.
What's the best choice for my case? Can you tell me your essential way to do that please?
I would use QGraphicsScene. It's a high-level interface for working with multiple bit-mapped graphics, so it will be simpler to use. The display logic for your game should be pretty forward to implement. (Just keep the graphics scene matched to the current game state).
You'll still need to handle user inputs by listening to keyboard events. You can implement that at the QMainWindow level.
And of course, you'll need to write the actual game logic.
I've been using label to display images. I'd like to be able to click and create a bounding box then be able to drag the cursor to move around in the image. What would I need to do this? Thanks.
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you are trying to do, but I think the QGraphicsScene is what you are looking for. You can (among many other things):
Render images (QGraphicsPixmapItem, for example)
Change the zoom level when rendering the scene on a QGraphicsView.
Select things using a "rubber band"
Move items around with the mouse (see QGraphicsItem::ItemIsMovable)
etc.
You may need to get familiar with Qt's graphics view framework.