Search Results
iPhone Game Development With Core Animation
I’ve made quite a few posts about OpenGL ES, and the available game engines on the iPhone, and I’d like to iterate that you do not need to use OpenGL ES or any game engine. Core Animation can be used for iPhone game development, and if you’re used to Objective-C/Cocoa it may be the easiest route.
Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques – Book Review
Core Animation is a topic that I’ve brought up a few times showing some code snippets for simple animation effects, and talking about how it could be used in simple games. Unfortunately the amount of material available covering Core Animation has been somewhat lacking, and nothing especially specifically covering iPhone OS 3. Fortunately Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques For Mac And iPhone Development was released in Late 2009 that covers this topic in more depth.
iPhone Game Programming: CoreAnimation vs. OpenGL ES
I saw an interesting question being asked by an aspiring iPhone game developer, "Should I use CoreAnimation or OpenGL ES?".
Simple answer:
Core Animation is fine for games where performance is not critical, and for new programmers will likely be easy to use, OpenGL is needed for anything else.
Long Answer:
Core Animation utilizes OpenGL ES, it is high level, and in my testing works fine in situations where performance is critical.
Animating A Game Sprite In Cocoa Touch
Something that can be very easily done using Cocoa Touch is animation. This is a brief programming tutorial showing how it’s done.
The easiest way to do animation in Cocoa Touch is using the animationImages property from a view.
It’s a simple 3 step process.
1. Set animation images to an array containing your UIImages to be used for animating.
2. Set the duration to animate for. (you can also set the number of times to repeat the animation for.)
3. Start the animation.
New iPhone OpenGL ES Animation Tutorial
An excellent iPhone OpenGL ES animation tutorial has been created by Jeff LaMarche covering the concepts of keyframing, interpolation, and creating a looping animation in OpenGL ES.
In the tutorial Jeff uses a simple 3D ball model created in Blender and exported using a custom script (available on the samepage) and goes into great deal explaining the entire process.
You can find the tutorial here along with all the neccessary files including the Blender 3D model exporting script here:
Fundamentals of Animation and Keyframe Animation