Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#21

Post by ttflee »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #5
shurcooL wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I think having at least a screenshot is a must. Or even an animated gif if it's some interaction (e.g. see plug [1]) you're trying to present. [1] https://github.com/shurcooL/Slide#slide

The only sites blocked in China that bother me are like dropbox and youtube. Suffice it to say, I see nothing on your github page, and all the links are broken.

You need a paid VPN account (, free ones works before they got too much attention and got blocked,) or other encrypted tunnels for HTTP payloads, in China.

BTW, nytimes.com and other whistle-blowers also get blocked.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#22

Post by SeoxyS »

This is an admirable effort, but I would not recommend ever using this in practice. I am saying this from experience: I wrote a game engine on top of UIKit, which I spent months trying to fine-tune before finally ditching it and re-writing everything to use Cocos2d.

The performance aspect is just not there. Once you get to a game with a large number of sprites and animations, animations will jitter and glitch. You're really going to be stretching what Core Animation can handle.

What I usually recommend these days is to use Cocos2d for your main game view, but using UIKit for the rest of the interface (menus, score screens, etc.).

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#23

Post by socialist_coder »

SeoxyS wrote: post #22

This is an admirable effort, but I would not recommend ever using this in practice. I am saying this from experience: I wrote a game engine on top of UIKit, which I spent months trying to fine-tune before finally ditching it and re-writing everything to use Cocos2d. The performance aspect is just not there. Once you get to a game with a large number of sprites and animations, animations will jitter and glitch. You're…

Yeah, I wonder why you would even try this when something like Cocos2d already exists and is awesome.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#24

Post by moshberm »

SeoxyS wrote: post #22

This is an admirable effort, but I would not recommend ever using this in practice. I am saying this from experience: I wrote a game engine on top of UIKit, which I spent months trying to fine-tune before finally ditching it and re-writing everything to use Cocos2d. The performance aspect is just not there. Once you get to a game with a large number of sprites and animations, animations will jitter and glitch. You're…

The performance of MBTileParser is fantastic. I've profiled map loading to take under 300 milliseconds. I wouldn't necessarily use this for an action game, but for RPGs, this is more than sufficient.

With a UIKit engine, you don't have to deal with OpenGL and UIKit fighting for performance.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#25

Post by moshberm »

socialist_coder wrote: post #23
SeoxyS wrote: post #22

This is an admirable effort, but I would not recommend ever using this in practice. I am saying this from experience: I wrote a game engine on top of UIKit, which I spent months trying to fine-tune before finally ditching it and re-writing everything to use Cocos2d. The performance aspect is just not there. Once you get to a game with a large number of sprites and animations, animations will jitter and glitch. You're…

Yeah, I wonder why you would even try this when something like Cocos2d already exists and is awesome.

Cocos2d (at least when I was using it) engendered some really bad anti-patterns in regards to memory management and architecture. MBTileParser doesn't just offer a way to show graphics onscreen, but it considers the MVC architecture in a way that cocos2d doesn't. (When I started, cocos2d was somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1. The state of the engine has very likely improved since, but that's why I wrote this.) Cocos2d didn't even support ARC back then.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#26

Post by seanmcdirmid »

shurcooL wrote: post #19
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only sites blocked in China that bother me are like dropbox and youtube. Suffice it to say, I see nothing on your github page, and all the links are broken.

Wow, I didn't know that. So everything I host on Dropbox (and I host _everything_ on Dropbox) is unavailable in China?! Is this country-wide or ISP-specific?

YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook are nationwide blocks. Imgur, tinypic, media wiki etc...seem to be blocked by some ISPs.

I'm obviously careful about this, there are good alternatives that work (for now) in china, e.g. Skydive rather than Dropbox. But even I have to we YouTube for video uploads.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#27

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ttflee wrote: post #21
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only sites blocked in China that bother me are like dropbox and youtube. Suffice it to say, I see nothing on your github page, and all the links are broken.

You need a paid VPN account (, free ones works before they got too much attention and got blocked,) or other encrypted tunnels for HTTP payloads, in China. BTW, nytimes.com and other whistle-blowers also get blocked.

We have a paid VPN account, it no longer works and we can't get a refund. It's like a game of cat and mouse, and I've kind of given up.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#28

Post by seanmcdirmid »

simcop2387 wrote: post #16
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL tinypic.com is blocked also :) CMCC wifi is a bit more strict than the other Chinese ISPs, they block imugr also while many other ISPs do not. My problems are admittedly very niche, and I will get to see everything when I'm at work tomorrow (if my VPN was working, I could see them now...drats). Thanks for the try though!

Here, let me see if I can get blocked in china now: http://www.simcop2387.info/Slide_1.gif

Yes, that works, thanks!

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#29

Post by winter_blue »

supercoder wrote: post #10
winter_blue wrote: post #8

Wouldn't drawing with UIKit be less efficient than using an OpenGL backend? SDL[1] on Windows for instance, falls back to GDL when proper DirectX support isn't available. GDI is what most GUI apps use to draw their elements on Windows. It is akin to UIKit on iOS. But GDI is horribly slow as all the computation is done on the CPU. In fact, realizing this fact, Microsoft has recently developed Direct2D, which does the…

Yep. While UIKit is going to draw using OpenGL anyway with this case you're missing a big optimisation in being able do batch drawing of the tiles and using VBO's etc. UIKit is fantastic for normal UI's and the 'general case' but almost certainly isnt optimised for doing efficient drawing of a large number of sprites / tiles (trading efficiency for flexibility). Couple years ago I actually wrote my own API compatible…

> I should release it one day as open source.. though is all OpenGL 1 so a little outdated on iOS these days.

You definitely should! :-D

You can worry about porting/updating it later. You might even get help in doing so, once you open-source it.

Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine

#30

Post by shurcooL »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #26
shurcooL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I didn't know that. So everything I host on Dropbox (and I host _everything_ on Dropbox) is unavailable in China?! Is this country-wide or ISP-specific?

YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook are nationwide blocks. Imgur, tinypic, media wiki etc...seem to be blocked by some ISPs. I'm obviously careful about this, there are good alternatives that work (for now) in china, e.g. Skydive rather than Dropbox. But even I have to we YouTube for video uploads.

Thanks for the heads up. That's pretty awful. I'm not going to stop using Dropbox over it, but it is upsetting to know so many people can't access my work posted there.
Post reply on HN