Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
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Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#2I don't know if I'm lazy or not, but the fact that I have to commit to downloading and running it before I can see what exactly it does is pretty off putting to me.
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#3+1 for native!
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#4I don't know if I'm lazy or not, but the fact that I have to commit to downloading and running it before I can see what exactly it does is pretty off putting to me.
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.
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#5I don't know if I'm lazy or not, but the fact that I have to commit to downloading and running it before I can see what exactly it does is pretty off putting to me.
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.
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#6Earlier 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.
http://i40.tinypic.com/21dkpx.gif
Re-uploaded the GIF file for him, hopefully this one loads for you.
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#7Earlier 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.
http://i40.tinypic.com/21dkpx.gif Re-uploaded the GIF file for him, hopefully this one loads for you.
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!
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#8Wouldn'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 computation on the GPU and which regular GUI apps can use to achieve better performance. (BTW, I believe Direct2D is somewhat similar to Cairo 2D.)
[1] Simple DirectMedia Layer -- used by plenty of games to achieve cross-platform compatibility. Most games in the Humble Indie Bundle use this.
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#9Wouldn'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…
Yes and no. The -(void)drawFrame call uses CPU, but almost everything else you do in UIKit is done in the gpu. (Everything that can be animated is done in the gpu)
Re: Show HN: A UIKit Game Engine
#10Wouldn'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 version of UIKit but backed by OpenGL , and then extended support for these type of cases. As it was basically a drop in replacement I was able to confirm UIKit (at least at the time) was not very clever or fast when it came to a large view hierarchy. So my fraemwork was optimising for large batch drawing from a single texture mostly which is what you really want in the OP's case.
I should release it one day as open source.. though is all OpenGL 1 so a little outdated on iOS these days.