Interactivity and Occasional Intrigue with Sam Keene
I’ve been wanting to make a cool dynamic 2D water effect for a while now. There are a lot of code examples out there for other platforms: Android, HTML 5 and JavaScript, but i was unable to find any example for iOS. So I spent the afternoon putting this together, download the Xcode project from … Continue reading 2D Dynamic Water Effect for iOS
If you’ve ever tried using a UIBezierPath to create anything more complex than a rounded corner you’ll understand how excruciatingly annoying it can be to control. Adding even more annoyance to this is there isn’t a lot of practical info out there on interpolating large complex sets of 2D points using cubic or quadratic curves. … Continue reading Animating Smooth Curves With UIBezierPath and CoreAnimation
I’ve always been a big fan of simple tap tap game mechanics, so with all of the hype surrounding the rise and fall of Flappy Bird I thought I’d jump on the band wagon and show you how to build your very own Flappy Bird clone: Bouncy Brick™. It’s an addictive game mechanic, it’s also … Continue reading Build Your Own Flappy Bird Clone Using iOS7’s SpriteKit
In everyone’s rush to make the next Candy Crush one of the more interesting features of iOS7’s new SpriteKit framework has flown under the radar. The SKVideoNode suddenly makes it super easy to play multiple videos simultaneously, something that was a little too tedious with the AVFoundation framework (see my previous blog post on this), … Continue reading Multiple Videos Playing Simultaneously The Easy Way With SpriteKit
UPDATE: This post is a companion/comparison to my other post on drawing 1000s of sprites using SpriteKit’s native batch drawing. I was interested to see if rasterization of the scene before the GL draw pass would improve performance. In this particular instance it doesn’t seem too. SpriteKit’s native batch drawing of the full node hierarchy … Continue reading SpriteKit Bit Blitting By Drawing To A Texture For Performance Optimization
The use of Delaunay triangulation as a visual effect has become very popular recently in motion graphics, and interactive works. It’s a pretty cool effect, but there aren’t a lot of examples of how to get it working. In this post I’m using this collection of Objective C Delaunay triangulation math classes I found on … Continue reading Delaunay Triangulation On The iPhone with SpriteKit
UPDATE: Upon further research into SpriteKit’s inner workings I’ve updated this post. Because SpriteKit automatically uses batch drawing where possible it is not always nessesery to draw the display hierarchy to a texture. I’ve found that SpriteKit can animate 10000 particles on screen at 60fps without blitting. If you are interested in blitting the display … Continue reading 10,000+ Sprites Animating And No Loss In Framerate Using iOS7’s SpriteKit
An app I’ve been working on recently required a user interaction/experience similar to a Rolodex, as you swipe a view down it pulls out slightly and flips over and around exposing the next view below, while anchored to a central cylinder at the base. Seeing as most developers are moving away from Cocos2D (which usually would … Continue reading iOS7’s SpriteKit and Real 2.5D