November 23, 2017

iPS 220: John Sundell

51 minutes

Panel: Gui Rambo Special Guest: John Sundell In today's episode, the iPhreak’s Gui Rambo speaks with John Sundell. John is an iOS Freelancer and currently works with a Norwegian company called Hyper. Hyper builds customer projects and in-house apps. John builds apps, games & developer tools. He also makes Swift by Sundell, which is a weekly blog & podcast about Swift development. He has worked for companies like Volvo & Spotify. He’s the creator of several open source projects including Unbox, SwiftPlate, Marathon & Imagine Engine. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 03:00 - What's Imagine Engine? It's a game engine that runs on Core Animation. 05:00 - API John explains what Imagine Engine provides in terms of API and functionality. 07:30 - Why not use SpriteKit? It's hard to predict how SpriteKit is going to work under pressure, being closed source makes it hard to study. 13:20 - What's Core Animation? It's an underlying framework that drives the drawing for the UI on Apple's platforms. 15:30 - How does Imagine Engine use Core Animation? Just like UIKit uses it, objects are backed by layers. 19:40 - Coding for performance You have to really think about the complexity of everything you do. 25:30 - Supporting different OSes John started with Metal, but noticed that Core Animation was fast enough. Both are available on all of Apple's platforms. 29:00 - The display link API Provides a callback so you can sync your code with the display refresh. 30:20 - Unit testing a game engine Doesn't use strict TDD, but prefers to test automatically so he doesn't have to create a game to test each feature of the engine. 33:05 - Are there games we can try made with Imagine Engine? Revazendo is in beta. 35:00 - How do you handle input and events? Imagine Engine provides an unified event API. 38:00 - Game development architecture There are two popular patterns: component-driven and driving from a central update method (loop). Imagine Engine uses a mix of both. LINKS: