Seasoned game developers may turn up their noses at the build-your-own-2D-game toolkit Apple has provided in Sprite Kit. Not even Apple is foolish enough to create a framework this extensive for the sole purpose of creating 2D games for the Mac. Sprite Kit particle emitters can be created and edited right in Xcode using this real-time visual interface.įinally, in case it doesn’t go without saying, Sprite Kit works on both OS X and iOS. An integrated particle editor makes creating and adjusting particle effects a fun, visual experience instead of a frustrating exercise of adjusting parameters and recompiling. Xcode will automatically combine individual sprite image files into larger, more efficient texture atlases.
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Recognizing that writing code is only a small part of game development, Apple has taken the extra step of adding Sprite-Kit-specific features to its Xcode IDE. All of this functionality is provided through a pleasantly abstracted Objective-C API that’s a far cry from the typical low-level C/C++ game engine code.
Sprite Kit can even turn video into a sprite, with all the same effects, transformations, and physics as a normal sprite. There’s a ray casting system for game mechanics based on line-of-sight, and methods for drawing vector shapes and text into a scene. Sprites can be scaled and distorted, and they can have Core Image filters and particle effects applied to them. It has a physics engine with collision detection to handle sprite interactions. Sprite Kit provides a complete set of tools for building a 2D game.
And unlike a sheet that slides down or a dialog box that fades in and out, animated elements in games are expected to interact with each other. Games are also likely to have many more animated elements on the screen simultaneously. While an application might have an animation to punctuate a particular transition, games are running animations constantly. Games have very different requirements than normal applications. While Core Animation and Scene Kit are both aimed at normal applications, Sprite Kit is explicitly designed for games. But wait, doesn’t Core Animation already cover the same territory? Not quite.
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Sprite Kit-you guessed it-makes it easy for Mac developers to integrate 2D sprites into their applications. All the player characters, items, and enemies moving around the screen are sprites. If you’ve ever played a game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, you’ve seen sprites in action. I’m not sure which project was started first within Apple, but I did notice that Sprite Kit got the “ SK” class name prefix while Scene Kit was stuck with “ SCN.”Ī sprite is a 2D image that can be placed and manipulated independently in a larger scene. Mavericks includes a framework that’s clearly part of the same family tree: Sprite Kit. Whether or not you believe that’s a good idea, I think Delicious Library 3 proves that Scene Kit has achieved its goal. It’s meant to help developers of regular Mac applications integrate 3D models and effects. While it’s possible to write a 3D game using Scene Kit, that isn’t the goal of the framework. Perhaps 3D models are more polarizing than 2D animations. I think its use of 3D to give some extra heft and sparkle to shelved items is extremely restrained and tasteful, but I’ve also heard the opposite opinion expressed. Delicious Library 3 uses Scene Kit to render three-dimensional items on its virtual shelves.
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