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iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 10 – Game Structure

You will be pleased to know that the first part of tutorial 10 is now available for viewing. It’s taken me much longer than I would have liked to get this ready, but I’m glad that at least part 1 is out.

This part of the tutorial covers the changes to the project structure I have made along with how I am managing different game scenes such as the main menu and core game scene. It also covers some of the changes I’ve made to the Image class etc.
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Black screen of .. urm .. nothingness

A number of blog readers have mentioned the problem of getting nothing but a black screen when running the earlier tutorials under SDK 3.0. This is something which has been discussed in other blog entries, but I should have really done a blog post for it a while ago to save people digging around for the solution.

Basically, in the app delegate, the following like of code

[glView mainGameLoop];

Needs to be changed to the following line of code:

[glView performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(mainGameLoop) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:NO];

The issue seems to be that the applicationDidFinishLaunching method is run on a thread other than the main queue, so our game loop needs to be run on the main thread and hence the command above works. I’m still not 100% certain of why this happened, but when I work it out or someone can tell me I’ll pass it on.

Hope that helps.

Mike

Lights, Camera and …..

For those waiting patiently for Tutorial 10, I just wanted to let you know that recording has started. It’s taken me way longer than I was hoping to get to this stage and I’ve not managed to get as many elements into the code as I would have liked, such as collision detection, but I will be covered those in the next tutorial.
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AngelCodeFont Class Performance Update

Jamie Hill who regularly comments on the blog has come up with a great change to the AngelCodeFont class. One of the last items added to the class was Kerning, which was using an NSDictionary as part of its implementation. This was proving to be really slow, so Jamie has come up with a change which I’ve placed below along with his full comment.
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Video Update 2

Hi all and welcome to Video Update 2. This is a quick 8 min video just to show you what I’m working on for Tutorial 10. Things are hectic at the moment, but progress is being made.

I hope you enjoy the video update and as always, it would be great to get feedback and comments.

Video Update 2

Mike

iPhone Distribution Build Cheatsheet

Stumbled across this very useful cheatsheet for creating a Distribution Build to submit to the App Store.

http://iphonedevelopertips.com/xcode/iphone-distribution-build-cheatsheet.html

Changes are coming…

I just wanted to let you all know that when I cover Tutorial 10 I will also be covering a number of changes to the overall project.

As I’ve been writing these tutorials and working on my own code I’ve found better ways of doing things as well as I’ve started to find my own style in how I like to set things out. It certainly seems that some patterns are useful when creating games such as the Singletons etc but in general you do what is necessary to get the game working :o)
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What’s in Tutorial 10

Hi all

I’m currently working on code for Tutorial 10. This currently includes:

- Moving around a tile map
- Controlling the player using the accelerometer
- Colliding with the tile map (location the player cannot move through)
- Firing lasers
- Moving bad guys around
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Watching the updates from WWDC

I am currently sat glued to the many updates which are coming out of WWDC. Tons of hardware updates and some renaming going on.

I’m liking the $29 upgrade price for Snow Leopard. No mention yet of a new Look and Feel, so it would seem that there is not going to be a refresh this time around. That said, Quicktime X looks nice as do the changes to Expose and Stacks. To be honest, I’m not that bothered by no changes to the look and feel. I love how Leopard looks at the moment, clean, simple, FX used where necessary and certainly not a desktop pimp like Vista was.
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What are you wishing for?

With WWDC approaching fast I thought it would be interesting to see what people are wishing for in terms of announcements. I’m certainly hoping for a good upgrade to the current iPhone 3G with better camera, better performance etc, but I’m also interested to see if they are going to extend Mobile Me at all and any announcements around their other software products such as iLife and iWork.
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