I’m looking for a good Text Editor for Mac OS X that supports Lua (preferably without installing any additional files). And I also want the editor to support autocomplete (aka code completion) for the Lua language, as well as being able to extend the autocomplete keywords. Much to my dismay this narrowed down the field [...]
In this episode you can see the Cocos2D Webcam Viewer in action. I also show you how to update a sprite’s texture while your app is running just by saving an updated version of the image, and how cool that actually is! The second half of the video is devoted to explaining my work schedule. [...]
Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could update your game’s assets while your app is running? It turns out you can, and it’s not even very complicated. Whether you want to tweak a game setting or experiment with a variety of image styles on the fly, this will be one of the things you wish [...]
This quick comparison sheet gives you all the info to decide whether to use Cocos2D 1.x or Cocos2D 2.x. Contrary to most programs, a higher version number doesn’t infer “better” or “more”. There are pros and cons for both versions. At the time of this writing the decision really only boils down to whether you [...]
It seems like a no-brainer to most computer-affiniados and gamers: eventually, all video games will be distributed online. The question is only, when? To retailers this seems to be a whole different story. Most of them are in denial, as I can tell from occasionally reading retail game publishing magazines. They’ll be in for quite [...]
This continues and concludes the previous post of the Fast Pixel-Perfect Collision Detection for Cocos2D with Example Code (1/2) article. Testing for pixelMask collision with a rectangle Testing for an individual point is simple, testing for a rectangle such as the bounding box of another node requires more work. Not just to write the code, [...]
Detecting collisions on pixel-perfect boundaries is the holy grail of collision detection in 2D games. As such, it seems like the ideal, if not to say perfect, solution to collision detection in general. Yet, it’s also quite complicated and the straightforward solutions don’t perform very well until you start optimizing the code. This first post [...]
Cocos2D’s CCRenderTexture class is shrouded in mysteries. Part of it because it has a low-level aura to it, and most certainly because it simply works differently than most Cocos2D nodes. In this tutorial you’ll learn all about CCRenderTexture and what you can use it for. The CCRenderTexture demo project will guide you through basic uses [...]
I took Mike Ash’s performance measuring code from 2008 with the improvements made by Stuart Carnie in early 2010 and turned that into a performance measuring project for 2012. I know it’s still 2011, consider this a forward-looking statement. In any case, the test project is available for download, ready to run, includes Cocos2D v1.0.1 [...]
I have no doubt that automatic reference counting (ARC) is the next big leap forward for Objective-C since the introduction of Objective-C 2.0. ARC allows you to put the burden of memory management on the (Apple LLVM 3.0) compiler, and never think about retain, release and autorelease ever again. Since many user’s first experiences with [...]
