Thursday, December 10, 2015

Ben: SpriteKit Has Problems

  It has been a while since I really blogged about what my inner geek has been doing.  For those of you that are non-technical, this might be the one you skip.
  Our latest game uses a different way of displaying the graphics, sounds, and any type of movement, actions, etc..  The framework, SpriteKit, was provided by Apple a few years ago.  It has evolved since then into a decent way to build a 2-Dimension type game.  They have taken care of a lot of the tedious underpinnings of animation, image sharing, and working with your game objects (nodes).   They also added nice things like Path-finding (how do I get this guy from here to there following this route), gravity (the rain IS falling), body contact methods, etc..
  I like the product, but lately I ungraded my device to the latest operating system (iOS 9.2) and am now seeing cryptic messages popup everytime an image is used.  Even worse, on certain devices, like  the iphone 5, the images are getting warped or stretched.  Kind of ugly, even if you ignore all the warning messages.   I ran quite a few tests using the device simulators with various iOS versions and it seems to be related to 9.2.  There are bugs logged against this problem and I am sure it will get worked out in the future, but it does scare the developers with SpriteKit apps being developed or already in the store.
"Whats up with your App images all wonky?"
  It seems to be related to the image and the background transparency as the image gets stretched more with this kind of element.  I can't be sure, but it seems this way.  Hopefully, this problem will get enough focus to be patched out fairly quickly or there are going to be some disappointed developers and users this holiday season.

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