I am confused as to how endless runner games actually work, conceptually, as far as having a never-ending canvas. Sprite Kit is under NDA, so I am going to use Cocos2D as my framework.
There are some tutorials on the web that are specific to other languages, and tools, but I just need to figure out basically: If I create a scene with a specific size, how do I create the illusion of a never-ending background? Do I just animated backgrounds behind the scene, or do I somehow dynamically add length to the scene, so my runner really is running along the canvas?
Do I make sense? I just cannot grasp what the actual method these games use is. They certainly feel like the runner sprite is moving along a canvas, but maybe it's just that he's staying still and all the elements are moving?
One way that you can make the "endless" environment is by making UIViews (or NSViews depending on what platforms your game will be available on) that contain only a section of the environment so they can be reused when the runner passes that part of the game. Each view can be dedicated to display a certain feature of the game such as a power-up or an obstacle and it will be up to the logic of your game to decide when to use each view.
Lets think of endless runner like jetpack joyride.
You might want to have two background nodes, each larger than the screen size by some amount (maybe 1.5 or 2 screen widths).
When you load your level, you load first background and add second background at the coordinates where first ends, so that they form long screen. Then when we start moving character along this background when first background leaves screen we can take it, and change its coordinates to those where second background frame ends. This way when this comes to an end, we do the same with it.
This way only using 2 long images we can simulate essentially endless space.
You can use longer sequences for your game.
You can add other nodes to your background when it has left the screen and present it, so it looks different each time.
Related
I’ve been developing an iOS app using Swift 4 but recently (today) decided to switch to Flutter/dart after hearing about its capabilities.
In my iOS app, I have a moving background of waves (actual waves when you think of an ocean).
The width of the the wave .png is 1606 units and I animated it in a way where it will translate from right to left 265 units in 1 second, then it repeats itself. This way, the waves are moving continuously when in reality, it’s only a fraction of the entire png repeating itself.
I needed this same background to apply to all ViewControllers (screens) in the app and I did this by sending the last known x value right before the transition through a segue (transition between viewcontrollers, I believe it’s a “route” for dart?) and used this value as the initial position of the waves in the next ViewController. When I swipe up or down, to move to different view controllers, the waves would also move accordingly.
For some reason, the animations were a bit choppy but I’d say 80% of the time, it was perfectly smooth. I need it to be 100% for when I release my app tho.
How would I go about accomplishing this type of animation in Dart?
For animations, Flare seems very promising and I’m kind of steering towards using that to accomplish my goal but I’d like to hear any advice on how I should approach this.
The animation performance depends on how it's implemented. Without a minimal repro, it'll be challenging to figure out the issue. Though other options that you may consider to animate the background is by using AnimatedPositioned widget. Using this should help manipulate the position of widgets displayed on screen.
Another one is by using Adobe After Effects animations and rendering it with lottie plugin on your app.
I am going to make simple 2D game in Defold game engine and I am new in this area. My question is, I have 2 game objects every object has sprites in it. A sprite in the first game object must be background for sprites of second object. I have designed it well but when I run (or render, I don't know how to call properly) it sometimes sprites of second game object are invisible and some times everything is OK.
The same issue if I set main backgruon image for the game. Please share your experiences with me. Thanks beforehand.
You posted the same question on the official Defold forum so I'm going to replicate the answer you got there here on SO as well. The solution is to make sure that the depth of two game objects that overlap isn't the same. If two objects have the same depth and overlap you might sometimes see one in front of the other and sometimes vice versa. The default render script allows a z-range of -1 to 1 (you can use fractional z-values to get fine grained control), but you can copy it from builtins and increase the range if you want to. Something like -10 to 10 is usually a good enough value.
I am creating a game using cocos2dx 2.1.4. Its FPS drops continuously , and never recover.
Please find the details as follows
Background about the way I am doing things:-
Its game about scrolling down some shapes, each shape is made up of some square blocks.I have 7 kind of blocks. All loaded in a Sprite Sheet and using these blocks from this sprite sheet I create a shape.
A level file is consist of these shapes. I load two levels at the same time one onscreen and another off screen to make it seamless scrolling. For loading two levels at the same time I used two different CCSprite game batch nodes as :-
CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->addSpriteFramesWithFile("56blackglow.plist");
_gameBatchNode1 = CCSpriteBatchNode::create("56blackglow.png", 200);
_gameBatchNode1->retain();
this->addChild(_gameBatchNode1,kForeground);
_gameBatchNode2= CCSpriteBatchNode::create("56blackglow.png", 200);
_gameBatchNode2->retain();
this->addChild(_gameBatchNode2,kForeground);
The problem I am facing is that as I keep on playing the game frame rate drops continuously , from 60 fps till 10 fps and never recovers or might recover in near future , as I observed for 20 minutes but its too much time to wait.
My observations:-
1> I used Time profiler it shows maximum time is in draw() calls. Also if I play game very fast the peak of time increases in track, that should be fine as I am giving more work to do, but once a peak is attained it remains approximately at that height only, even if I leave the game Idle. Is it normal ? According to me it should have returned to its normal peak once the current work is done.
2> Some where I thought its happening because I used two batch nodes and removing its children on a user touch immediately might causing it slow but then after removing the children it should run normal. to give an idea is it ok to remove 10 children from batch node immediately ? some guys say its very slow process. Just to check if this causing problem , I did :-
Instead of removing them I just set visibility of the children to false.But still FPS drops and never recovers.
Please share your thoughts on this.
Though SpriteBatchNodes are generally quite good for drawing a lot of elements efficiently, I think there are best used for static/not-so-dynamic elements. In your case, if you have a lot of elements which go out of the screen but are still alive the draw() function will have to make some checks, thus hogging your performance (even if you set isVisible(false); explicitly, it still nedds to be checked).
In your case I think it would be better if you simply added new shapes outside of screen via some time-based function, and if they scroll outside of view simply remove them from scene, without using batchNodes.
Just found that with every touch, I am adding 8 new sprites to the layer, and its adding every time I touch . So with time I am giving more and more work to do. This is the problem
Actually I wanted to replace the sprite at 8 places with a touch, the way I was doing every time :-
_colorBottom1=CCSprite::createWithSpriteFrameName(png[0]);
this->addChild(_colorBottom1,kForeground);
_colorBottom1->setPosition(ccp((_colorPanelLeftPad)*_blockWidth,_blockWidth));
It was causing this sprite to be added with every touch.
but it should have been (Replace the texture instead of creating the Sprite again):-
CCSpriteFrame *frame1=CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName(png0);
_colorBottom1->setDisplayFrame(frame1);
I am interested in roughly how megatextures are/could be implemented on iOS.
In particular I am making a 2D platformer with a large (non-tiled) background and I would like to have one (precalculated, unreasonably large) image that is mapped to the background. One option I have gone with is to chop the precalulated image into tiles, and load/unload in the background.
I am however curious about megatextures. It would be far more convenient to map these all to one surface. Are megatextures simply another way of phrasing what I am doing right now, or is something more cunning going on. Is there one superlarge texture on the graphics card with multiple gltexsubimage2d calls going on?
Megatexture is a well-developed and advanced implementation of clip-mapping technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipmap
So yes, basically it is a continuous background loading of content to be displayed and unloading of currently unused content.
I would like to have some text appear and disappear in a puff of smoke effect in an iPhone game. For example, when someone scores points, I want to show the new points that were added. It should appear in a puff of smoke and disappear within a second or two.
How do I create that?
Have a look at Particle Designer from 71 Squared. It costs about $7.99 and includes easy code generation and integration. There are some pre-configured smoke effects available in the shared library.
http://particledesigner.71squared.com
You will most likely have kind of "cheap" effects using particles, but you'll have a good control over the animation (velocity, scaling, acceleration...).
Another way to go is to use multiple images of smoke and overlay them, then launch an UIView animation with random properties for rotating, scaling and timing.