Like all good stories, this one starts with a quest as well. Make a board game with SwiftUI.
Trust me, once you find the right parts, it makes sense, tapping into State, conditional rendering and some good old fashioned algorithms makes the whole thing tick nicely.
The Board
First we need a nice board to play with. And we are creating it with SwiftUI in a few lines of code.
The Map
Our map looks like this:
We use two variations here, one single dimension and one 2D map for convenience…
Recently I was looking for ways to control animations that are baked in 3D Models with Swift but all I could find was bits and pieces over the internet with no robust way of handling key frame animations of 3D Models specifically in .scn format.
So upon decrypting the very vague Apple API documentation I came up with a procedure that is a good solution or at least a good starting point (because how animations are implemented with the various tools can vary greatly).
So let’s get cooking, we will need:
This is the story of a humble App until they met a powerful particle effect that added a so much needed “wow!” effect.
In this tutorial, we will create a cool exploding effect for a 3D SCNNode.
The User Interface way
On our XCode project, we create a new Group (with a folder) named particles and we add a SCN file inside.
Robots, or Bots as they are called, are a good way of automating tasks and provide users with generic or specialized feedback.
For this article, we will see how we can create a bot that informs the users of the weather conditions on their desired destination with some nice emoji and by digesting the WeatherAPI response.
The end result will look like this:
Recently I wanted to create a registration form using the Greek locale, and this had to be done in React native. Also this endeavour needed to support a pre-filled state in case the user wanted to edit some of the values.
Don’t be that guy trying to create a form and ending up with a blank screen!
So let’s begin!
The fields I needed to use for the form were the following:
- Name -> (input) - Surname -> (input) - Email -> (input) - Phone number -> (input) - Date of birth -> (date picker native) - Terms and…Pending requests/challenges is a great feature to have, especially for multiplayer games, however Facebook SDK doesn’t really give us many tools to go on, currently the only way to see any pending challenges is via the native Facebook menu when calling chooseAsync
And this is where this article comes into play. In order to achieve this we use a simple functionality that includes the context match-idand the opponentsuser-facebook-id
We will create two mechanics, one to receive Any challenges in any context from anyone, and one to receive pending challenges for the current context (this is especially useful for games that…
See part 1 here: Facebook Instant Games 1v1 Multiplayer using Firebase (Part 1)
On part one we explained the front-end of the multiplayer feature for a Facebook Instant Game, now let’s see the back-end logic using Firebase Firestore-DB and Functions (a sandboxed NodeJS environment to write backend logic without owning a server)
This is how you can get started:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/get-started?authuser=1
Now assuming that our environment is all setup, let’s write some logic to handle the front-end requests
Since Facebook Instant Games is a relatively new platform, there are many parts that are missing or simply don’t work the way someone would expect them to.
So in order to launch our game with multiplayer (1v1) support we had to implement our own solution, we chose Firebase because of their new tech Functions that allows backend-logic to be uploaded and run on their servers, and because their platform and solutions are able to scale if we needed them to (for a relatively low price).
Mind that the following backend code was written by a front-end developer and things might…
Because puzzling together bits and pieces from around the internet is not fun!
The Quest: Create an Audio player without external libs (well almost)
I have scoured the lengths of the known google space to find all available information about making an Audio Player with Swift and with basic functionalities. Simple right? Well turns out… not so much.
The majority of StackOverflow (SO from now on) handles part of the procedure and usually is split between Obj-C, Swift-2, Swift-3, and a small percentage Swift-4. Articles also suffer from Swift versioning, or lack thereof, and are completely written in Obj-C. Plugins and libraries are also either outdated, written in Obj-C, or unmaintained.
Michalis Dobekidis
Senior software engineer (7linternational.com) with a passion for games (playing and creating). I love the creative part of coding and things that are exciting!
