This is a short post discussing a few issues that we encountered with updating our SpritKit based game, Fillips Feast, to work with iOS 9.
For the most part everything just worked when running Fillip’s Feast on iOS 9. But, we did encounter a few issues.
One of the first things we noticed was that our intro video was not being shown when running under iOS 9. The video which played fine under prior OS versions was not visible in iOS 9. But, it was playing so it was not an issue of the video. For game loading intro we created a loading scene that is presented when the app first starts. This includes a splash screen, which is an SKSpritNode that displays the first frame of the video and an SKVideoNode used to play the intro video. We also add a message to the intro view once all the assets have finished loading to let the user know that they can tap the screen to skip the rest of the video.
After a bit of debugging we determined that the issues was related to the zPosition of the video. In building the intro scene we had not explicitly set the zPosition for the elements. Simply adding the video node to the scene after adding the splash screen sprite node had been working fine. Explicitly setting the zPosition for the video node, now allowed the video to be shown in iOS 9. But, this had an undesirable side effect in iOS 8 and prior. Now the video was displaying a black screen that flashed before the video started playing. The solution to this was to test for the availability of an iOS 9 feature and only set the zPosition on iOS 9. To do this we simply tested to see that [SKCameraNode class] returned true before setting the zPostion. We also found a few other places in the app where the zPosition needed to be set.
At this point things were looking good, except on iOS 9 the intro video was not playing smoothly. It would play about a third of the way though, freeze, then jump forward and play the final third of the video. This was not an issue on devices that where running an older version of iOS. This problem was isolated to the SKLabelNode we where adding at the bottom of the page to let the user know that could “tap to continue” and skip the rest of the video. We had actually had similar performance issue trying to use an SKLableNode to display the score you are awarded when you catch a bug. The fix for this was to swap out the label node for an SKSpritNode with an image for the text message. The downside of this is it makes it impractical to internationalize this text.
Fillip’s Feast Intro Video