How can I dismiss a ViewController from my GameScene.swift? - ios

Question

QUESTION: How can I dismiss a ViewController from my GameScene.swift ?
SITUTATION: I have 2 VCs in my SpriteKit Game, like so:
ViewController.swift ----Press Play-----> GameViewController
When the player loses, I want to dismiss the GameViewController so the player can press play again. I check for the player's loss in my GameScene.swift and would like to dismiss the GameVC from there.
N.B.: Googled this without success.
WHAT I TRIED:
1) Creating a gameVC instance in my GameScene.swift and dismissing it like so:
let gameVC = GameViewController()
gameVC.dismissViewController(false,completion: nil)
2) Doing:
self.view.window!.rootViewController?.dismissViewControllerAnimated(false, completion: nil)
Those don't work for obvious reasons ^^

Answer 1

You don't want to "grab" the existing instance: https://pragprog.com/articles/tell-dont-ask
You need to either hand GameScene a reference to the view controller so it can dismiss it, or use the delegate pattern to communicate backwards to a controlling object that the VC should be dismissed/dismiss itself.
A simple example… you can add a GameViewController property to GameScene, then dismiss the VC at the appropriate time:
class GameScene: SKScene {
var gameVC: GameViewController?
func gameDidEnd() {
gameVC?.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true) {
// if desired, do any cleanup after the VC is dismissed
}
}
}
Then, just set this property when creating the GameScene object in the first place:
if let gameScene = GameScene(fileNamed: "MyScene") {
gameScene.gameVC = someGameVC
}
This simple approach will tightly couple GameScene and GameViewController, making it a bit more difficult if you ever want to use one of these objects without the other. But for this simple use case, it may be fine.

Answer 2

I've follow some of your discussion. I want to add some code, because usually I prefeer to work with one ViewController or two and many SKScene and SKNode, but in this case could be useful to have a currentViewController reference:
class MyModelScene: SKScene {
let appDelegate = UIApplication.sharedApplication().delegate as! AppDelegate
var currentViewController : MyModelViewController! = MyModelViewController()
// MyModelViewController is a customized UIViewController
override func didMoveToView(view: SKView) {
super.didMoveToView(view)
print("---")
print("∙ \(NSStringFromClass(self.dynamicType))")
print("---")
}
}
class Level1Scene: MyModelScene {
...
}
In the UIViewController:
class PreloadViewController: MyModelViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
if let scene = Level1Scene(fileNamed:"Level1Scene") {
// Configure the view.
let skView = self.view as! SKView
skView.showsFPS = true
skView.showsPhysics = true
skView.showsNodeCount = true
skView.ignoresSiblingOrder = true
/* Set the scale mode to scale to fit the window */
scene.scaleMode = .ResizeFill
scene.currentViewController = self
skView.presentScene(scene)
}
}
}
With this code , you've always a currentViewController reference in your SKScene and you can check if it's the correct viewController you want to dismiss or not.