Is this a good way to do a game loop for an iPhone game?
- by Danny Tuppeny
Hi all,
I'm new to iPhone dev, but trying to build a 2D game. I was following a book, but the game loop it created basically said:
function gameLoop
update()
render()
sleep(1/30th second)
gameLoop
The reasoning was that this would run at 30fps. However, this seemed a little mental, because if my frame took 1/30th second, then it would run at 15fps (since it'll spend as much time sleeping as updating).
So, I did some digging and found the CADisplayLink class which would sync calls to my gameLoop function to the refresh rate (or a fraction of it). I can't find many samples of it, so I'm posting here for a code review :-) It seems to work as expected, and it includes passing the elapsed (frame) time into the Update method so my logic can be framerate-independant (however I can't actually find in the docs what CADisplayLink would do if my frame took more than its allowed time to run - I'm hoping it just does its best to catch up, and doesn't crash!).
//
// GameAppDelegate.m
//
// Created by Danny Tuppeny on 10/03/2010.
// Copyright Danny Tuppeny 2010. All rights reserved.
//
#import "GameAppDelegate.h"
#import "GameViewController.h"
#import "GameStates/gsSplash.h"
@implementation GameAppDelegate
@synthesize window;
@synthesize viewController;
- (void) applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application
{
// Create an instance of the first GameState (Splash Screen)
[self doStateChange:[gsSplash class]];
// Set up the game loop
displayLink = [CADisplayLink displayLinkWithTarget:self selector:@selector(gameLoop)];
[displayLink setFrameInterval:2];
[displayLink addToRunLoop:[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];
}
- (void) gameLoop
{
// Calculate how long has passed since the previous frame
CFTimeInterval currentFrameTime = [displayLink timestamp];
CFTimeInterval elapsed = 0;
// For the first frame, we want to pass 0 (since we haven't elapsed any time), so only
// calculate this in the case where we're not the first frame
if (lastFrameTime != 0)
{
elapsed = currentFrameTime - lastFrameTime;
}
// Keep track of this frames time (so we can calculate this next time)
lastFrameTime = currentFrameTime;
NSLog([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%f", elapsed]);
// Call update, passing the elapsed time in
[((GameState*)viewController.view) Update:elapsed];
}
- (void) doStateChange:(Class)state
{
// Remove the previous GameState
if (viewController.view != nil)
{
[viewController.view removeFromSuperview];
[viewController.view release];
}
// Create the new GameState
viewController.view = [[state alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, IPHONE_WIDTH, IPHONE_HEIGHT) andManager:self];
// Now set as visible
[window addSubview:viewController.view];
[window makeKeyAndVisible];
}
- (void) dealloc
{
[viewController release];
[window release];
[super dealloc];
}
@end
Any feedback would be appreciated :-)
PS. Bonus points if you can tell me why all the books use "viewController.view" but for everything else seem to use "[object name]" format. Why not [viewController view]?
