Working on bCandied new release

To speed up release, I am working in Objective-C, removed the C++ PowerVR parts and refactored those bits as modules for Objective-C.  I’ve also moved over to SpriteKit. After four years it felt the right thing to do.

I’ve made numerous small edits over the years, but most everything that was at one time available has been deprecated.  And now with the Power VR chipset going byebye with the A11 Bionic chip. Yes Spritekit makes total sense.

Similarly SudokuGeek I have re-written in SceneKit but not worked on finishing it just yet in favor of bCandied!

bCandied Dev ScreenShot

One of the larger challenges was to let go of the old project and start it from scratch.  I didn’t really loose anything this way and it got rid of a Lot of SpriteKit issues that seemed like random crashes.  Perhaps something wasn’t mixing with having SpriteKit and all the old C++ PowerVR Code, at any rate, if you see SpriteKit having random crashes that don’t have solutions. You may want to do the same, step back, start fresh, copy to a new project.

This also benefited Xcode 9 immensely, it allowed development to become quicker and efficient. It no longer was looking at all the old files that were not going to be used.

Xcode screen

I am also impressed that spritekit works hard at managing power consumption now.  If there are no updates on screen, you can see here it drops to 1 FPS, easily at a glance I can tell what is going on with the game all inside Xcode and not having to run the GPU profiler.

At any rate, I’m enjoying Xcode 9 and Sprite kit immensely!

Specific challenges:
Make the game more fun and enticing!

eSpecialized's Blog

Bill Thompson

I am a mobile smartphone and embedded Linux engineer. I love to tinker with electronics and fly drones in spare time when not geeking out in a developers world!

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