Scrollview in Spritekit using Swift Programmatically (no storyboard) - ios

Question

So I'm hoping to learn about making a scrollview of icons (kinda like a menu) in Spritekit, using Swift. I can't find any good resources or tutorials that don't charge.
I have my basic app set up with a ViewController and my scene.
I'm hoping to have a scrollview that's say 2 or 3 times longer than the height of the screen, where I can scroll up and down and view different icons.
I hope this would be a good implementation, so I can programmatically set all the icons using x/y coordinates.
My viewdidLoad:
override func didMoveToView(view: SKView) {
/* Setup your scene here */
addChild(worldNode)
//create Scrollview
//for loop to adding icons from top to bottom of scrollview
//name sprites
//use touch location so allow sprites to be clickable
//will just adjust alpha of icon for testing purposes later
}
This is really all I'm looking at achieving at the moment, if you can imagine, something like this:
Some of the questions that I have seen here seem to go in far more detail than I imagine I need, and are too complex for me at this stage, or they are not in swift...
How can I include a scrollview?
Thank you in advance :)

Answer 1

If your entire UI is a scene built with SpriteKit, you may want to consider building it as if it were a scrolling scene with a camera. Here's an example in a gameplay context
Basically it could work like this:
var sceneCam: SKCameraNode! //declare your camera variable in your scene class
Then, in your didMoveToView function:
sceneCam = SKCameraNode() //initialize your camera
//scaleAsPoint lets you zoom the camera in and out
sceneCam.scaleAsPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.25, y: 0.25)
camera = sceneCam //set the scene's camera
addChild(sceneCam) //add camera to scene
//position the camera on the scene.
sceneCam.position = CGPoint(x: frame.center.x, y: frame.center.y)
Now, in your touchesMoved gesture handler, when you detect the pan, you can adjust the camera position to match the pan gesture translation.
override func touchesMoved(touches: NSSet, withEvent event: UIEvent) {
let touch = touches.anyObject() as UITouch
let positionInScene = touch.locationInNode(self)
let previousPosition = touch.previousLocationInNode(self)
let translation = CGPoint(x: positionInScene.x - previousPosition.x, y: positionInScene.y - previousPosition.y)
sceneCam.position = CGPoint(x: sceneCam.position.x - translation.x, y: sceneCam.position.y - translation.y)
}
The other crucial part of the setup is just to make your scene the right size for your menu. This is a similar concept to your content size on a scrollview. You might also have some work to do to implement paging or similar UIScrollView features if you desire those. But if you just need a simple scrolling view, you could do it with a camera.
If you ONLY want UIKit elements on this view, it should probably just be it's own VC without a scene. You could even create this menu view controller and place it in a container on your game scene - that way you'd be using only UIKit components in your menu vc, but you can still use it in a SpriteKit setting.