I just bought the Apple Watch and I want to create a super simple game for it.
It is simple enough to only use monochrome color scheme, but advanced enough to have an object moving in real-time.
I am trying to figure out how to position an object on my Apple Watch with Watch OS 2.
I want to place my object somewhere on the screen (anywhere I'd like to) but there are absolutely
no way to do that, I think.
But, in the following library: https://github.com/shu223/watchOS-2-Sampler
the developer can actually animate the alignment of the image so I guess
that itself suggests it should be possible to somehow specify a point of where to position an object.
And the animation is pretty smooth as well.
I have tried to generate frames on-the-fly CGContext which uses Quartz 2D, but it's way too slow and the app on my Apple Watch just crashes.
I don't necessarily think that the watch itself is too weak, but some clever programming should solve my problem, but I just cant figure out how to do it.
As you already said there is no way to directly position an WKInterfaceObject on your watch. You can change the alignment of an object but that leaves exactly 3 positions: left, center and right. Probably not enough for your game.
What you could do: You can set a background image on a WKInterfaceGroup. So you could draw your game objects into an UIImage and set that as background image of that group. That background images can also be animated. So maybe you can draw the movement of your game object into several UIImages and then set those as animated background image.
One way that I have found to have a little more control over where a WKInterfaceObject is on the screen is to add it to a parent WKInterfaceGroup, and center your item (vertically and/or horizontally depending on how you want to move it). Then you can tweak the group's relative height / width (setRelativeHeight and setRelativeWidth) and it's alignment (setVerticalAlignment and setHorizontalAlignment) to get your item positioned where you want.
This doesn't give you the ability to tweak frames or give the item a particular coordinate, but it does give you the ability to programmatically move a WKInterfaceObject anywhere on the screen.
For example if you want your object in the exact center of the screen vertically, you leave the group's relative height to its container as 1, with your item centered. To get the object at 40% from the top, you can change the group's relative height to 0.8 and it's alignment to .Top. If you want it 60% from the top, the relative height would still be 0.8, but the group's vertical alignment should be .Bottom etc.
I know this is kind of a confusing way to have to accomplish this, but this worked for me in getting items positioned exactly how I wanted.
Related
I've imported a vector layer from a psd into paint code v1, I'm trying to create a background image and make it universal.
I can't seem to add a frame around the vector, to complicate matters, I only need a portion, the center, of the layer. (The design is based around a circle, it has lines drawn towards the center of the circle.)
I can’t seem to add a frame to dynamically resize the part I need.
I found this http://www.raywenderlich.com/36341/paintcode-tutorial-dynamic-buttons the part about frame ans groups doesn't help me....
When I add a click frame and drag it around the area I need, it's at the same level as the vector layer. I've also tried adding a group around both, but that doesn't seem to obey the frame size either.
I’ve looked through the tutorials and googled adding a frame, but I can’t seem to achieve what I need.
EDIT
A frame is supposed to be at the same level as the vectors you're working with.
All you do then is set the resize rules of your vectors. There is a little rectangle in the frame's parameters interface with straight arrows and springs that you can modify to fit your wishes.
I think I also remember a checkbox setting to resize only what's inside the frame.
Now I haven't used PaintCode for a while, but if this doesn't help you, there probably is a problem with your vector layer.
I don't know if this information helps.
But if you resizing doesn't work as you expected. Look carefully at the transformation box (the one with the springs attached). When you have put a frame around your object. The middle dot in this box should be blue instead of green. if t's green, you may have a problem with the originating point of your objects and then the resizing may not work as you expected.
I have UISlider with min and max track colors. I want to draw vertical line (or image) in the middle of the slider track. This line must be there the whole time, only color on top of it will be different (min / max track color).
If I put UIImage on the Slider background, tracks covers it. If I set clear color for tracks, I can see line, but no colors from tracks (obviously). Is there any simple way, how to do this, or I have to override drawRect method for Slider ?
Something like on the slider in image
Note that the sort of "ultimate" solution to this type of project is...
http://www.paintcodeapp.com
As #BradAllred pointed out, the fundamental problem here is: you are trying to avoid drawRect.
Realistically, you can only achieve your goal here by subclassing UIControl or slider.
As others have mentioned fortunately there are many great tutorials, etc, on doing this -- and it's not hard.
Once again paintcodeapp.com is kind of an "incredible secret" to making iOS apps, enjoy.
add an UIView that is 1 pixel wide and has the height of the Slider and put it over the slider.
Create a CALayer, draw it, (even add an image to it), then add that layer as a sublayer to the Slider's layer.contents.
Im a little bit lost on how to go about this, im really looking for the theory behind it im not 100% sure if the title is correct or not.
Im currently working on a iOS app and im a little stuck with the progress indicator thats been designed ive attached a image of it below
as you can see when the user progresses through the stages of the challenge the background of this image fills up with white so if they are in stage 1 of a 5 stage challenge its filled 20% stage 2 40% etc.
the issue I have is im not 100% sure how to go about this, if I was doing this in HTML i would create the image with the green background and leave the area for the rabbit and shape transparent and then create a div behind it that would change its height.
should I be applying the same principle to iOS development or should I be building it in a more programatic and efficient way.
thanks all for your help
The solution you are talking about sounds fine. Many programmatic solutions would involve masking and would probably be less performant (masking is actually quite expensive), other programatic solutions involve stroking different vector paths but that would get complicated if you want to cut them all of a the same line.
So, translating your idea into views. Create a container UIView with a light green background, and add to it a white UIView and an UIImageView (in that order to get the image on top). The image view would have the green image with transparency set as its image. The white view would start of being positioned below the light green view (have a frame with a higher y value) and as the stages progress you simply shift the white view upward by modifying it's center or frame properties. (note that y increases downwards).
This may be a childish way
Make an UIImageView and add that in your view where you place your rabbit view.
Make the width and x axis value as same of your rabbit view and change the height and y-axis value as the stages completes.
Add the rabbit view above your imageview.
In this way you can have not only color of your progress you can even assign a image in future to show the progress of the different changes.
-(void)completedStage:(int)stage
{
CGRect frame=rabbitimage.frame;
bgimageview.frame= CGRectMake(rect.orgin.x,rect.frame.orgin.y+rect.frame.size.height-stage*0.2,rect.frame.size.width,rect.frame.size.height-0*2)
}
Hope this helps !!!
The application I am working on requires a 4px bar height with a full screen size width. I need to be able to select this 4px bar and move it around. I also can not change the size of this bar it has to be 4px in height.
This wouldn't be that big of an issue if I wasn't using OpenGL to create the object. OpenGL obviously does not have its own selection features so I am needing to program my own.
Initially after research I built a color selector to identify the object. How my color selector works is what ever x and y my finger touch returns from touchesBegan: is the pixel I grab from a screenshot of the OpenGL View. The issue with this is finger location is not precise at all. If I use the mouse it works perfect...
I decided to maybe loop through a buffer zone of the selected x and y but unfortunately a screenshot of the OpenGL view has antialiasing happens to the image when it's stored in memory and the buffer returns several shade of my objects color. I could possibly do a comparative color look up, to see if its in the range of colors but that seems overly complicated with how much I have already had to do. Plus cycling through the buffer zone isn't quick.
I also have thought maybe just remembering the location of my line on the screen and if my finger is close to that location just know that that's the one I want to select and move it around.
The future of this application can have up to 4 lines just like this so, I want something more secure then just knowing the location of where it is in memory.
What better way is there out there of handling selection of small objects?
How about maintaining an array of frames for the four objects, but expand the heights to something more manageable (8px or bigger)? Then, a touch within the larger region could be compared against the array (using CGRectContainsPoint). If you get a hit, then "snap to" the center point of the smaller (4px) rectangle before beginning the drag.
I do something like this by maintaining a list of "drop targets" for drag & drop, where it snaps to the drop target when it gets pretty close. Don't know if I'm conveying the idea very well, but it ought to work.
If the four 4px rectangles are going to be contiguous or very close together, you'll have to be able to make the selected one stand out or the user won't be able to tell which they're dragging -- but you could do that by making it bigger (maybe 6-8 px) then bringing it to the front so it overlays its adjacent neighbors.
More of an idea than an answer I guess.
John,
I would suggest a different approach. As you've discovered, touches in iOS are very imprecise. Apple usually suggests that the "hit box" for your controls be at least 40x40 points. I've gone as small as 30x30 points, but that starts to get hard.
What I would suggest you do is to factor your code so the app knows where the line is, and keeps track of it as a logical object. Then in your touch handler, interpret touches based on a large "buffer area" around the things you want the user to be able to move. If you just have a single horizontal bar, this should work great. Where you'll get into trouble is if you have multiple, thin horizontal bars that are close together. In that case you might need to rethink your app design and find another way to solve the problem.
As for the implementation details, you might add a pan gesture recognizer to your OpenGL view, and have it notify the OpenGL view of touch and drag actions. Then your OpenGL view can use knowledge of where your draggable objects are to decide how to interpret the touches.
I'm working on yet another drawing app with canvas that is many times bigger than screen.
I need some advice/direction on how to that.
Basically what i want is to scroll around this big canvas, drawing only in visible region.
I was thinking of two approaches:
Have 64x64 (or whatever) "tiles" to draw on, and then on scroll just load new tiles.
Record all user strokes (points) and on scroll calculate which are in specified region, and draw them, using only screen-size canvas.
If this matters, i'm using cocos2d for prototype.
Forget the 2000x200 limitation, I have an open source project that draws 18000 x 18000 NASA images.
I suggest you break this task into two parts. First, scrolling. As was suggested by CodaFi, when you scroll you will provide CATiledLayers. Each of those will be a CGImageRef that you create - a sub image of your really huge canvas. You can then easily support zooming in and out.
The second part is interacting with the user to draw or otherwise effect the canvas. When the user stops scrolling, you then create an opaque UIView subclass, which you add as a subview to your main view, overlaying the view hosting the CATiledLayers. At the moment you need to show this view, you populate it with the proper information so it can draw that portion of your larger canvas properly (say a circle at this point of such and such a color, etc).
You would do your drawing using the drawRect: method of this overlay view. So as the user takes action that changes the view, you do a "setDisplayInRect:" as needed to force iOS to call your drawRect:.
When the user decides to scroll, you need to update your large canvas model with whatever changes the user has made, then remove the opaque overlay, and let the CATiledLayers draw the proper portions of the large image. This transition is probably the most tricky part of the process to avoid visual glitches.
Supposing you have a large array of object definitions used for your canvas. When you need to create a CGImageRef for a tile, you scan through it looking for overlap between the object's frame and the tile's frame, and only then draw those items that are required for that tile.
Many mobile devices don't support textures over 2048x2048. So I would recommend:
make your big surface out of large 2048x2048 tiles
draw only the visible part of the currently visible tile to the screen
you will need to draw up to 4 tiles per frame, in case the user has scrolled to a corner of four tiles, but make sure you don't draw anything extra if there is only one visible tile.
This is probably the most efficient way. 64x64 tiles are really too small, and will be inefficient since there will be a large repeated overhead for the "draw tile" calls.
There is a tiling example in Apples ScrollViewSuite Doesn't have anything to do with the drawing part but it might give you some ideas about how to manage the tile part of things.
You can use CATiledLayer.
See WWDC2010 session 104
But for cocos2d, it might not work.