Apple adds Sprite Kit graphics and physics library to iOS and OS/X

 

The Apple World Wide Developer conference is currently going on and generally there isn’t all that much of interest to game developers.  This year is a bit of an exception as they added SpriteKit to OSX Maverick (10.9) as well as an upcoming release of iOS.  SpriteKit seems to be a combination of sprite library and physics engine.  In their own words:

Sprite Kit provides a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure that you can use to animate arbitrary textured images—sprites. Sprite Kit uses a traditional rendering loop that allows processing on the contents of each frame before it is rendered. Your game determines the contents of the scene and how those contents change in each frame. Sprite Kit does the work to render frames of animation efficiently using the graphics hardware. Sprite Kit is optimized to allow essentially arbitrary changes to each frame of animation.

Sprite Kit also provides other functionality that is useful for games, including basic sound playback support and physics simulation. In addition, Xcode provides built-in support for Sprite Kit, allowing complex special effects and texture atlases to be easily created and then used in your app. This combination of framework and tools makes Sprite Kit a good choice for games and other apps that require similar kinds of animations. For other kinds of user-interface animation, use Core Animation instead.

Followed by:

Sprite Kit is available on iOS and OS X. It uses the graphics hardware available on the hosting device to efficiently composite 2D images together at high frame rates. Sprite Kit supports many different kinds of content, including:

  • Untextured or untextured rectangles (sprites)

  • Text

  • Arbitrary CGPath-based shapes

  • Video

Sprite Kit also provides support for cropping and other special effects, allowing these effects to be applied to all or a portion of the content. All of these elements can be animated or changed in each frame. You can also attach physics bodies to these elements so that they properly support forces and collisions.

By supporting a rich rendering infrastructure and handling all of the low-level work to submit drawing commands to OpenGL, Sprite Kit allows you to focus your efforts on solving higher-level design problems and creating great gameplay.

So basically it’s a 2D game engine competing with the likes of Cocos2D.  Of course, if you use SpriteKit you will be tied to iOS/OS/X and the newest release at that.  If you are an Apple only shop, this isn’t a big deal, but if you work cross platform or are targeting older hardware, this new library is pretty much useless for now.

 

If you have an Apple ID, you can log in and read the documentation here.

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