https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/ 2026-10-12T06:39:10+00:00 https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/ https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/_media/wiki/dokuwiki.svg text/html 2014-08-25T06:32:45+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/adding_uikit_elements_on_top_of_sparrow?rev=1408948365&do=diff Adding UIKit Elements on top of Sparrow Sparrow renders all its contents directly into the view object of its SPViewController. Since the view is a normal UIView object, you can add any conventional UIKit view objects on top of Sparrow. The UIKit objects will always be drawn on top of the Sparrow elements, though; you cannot place Sparrow elements on top of UIKit elements. text/html 2015-03-11T13:15:48+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/animation?rev=1426079748&do=diff Animation Animations are a fundamental part of any game. Sparrow helps you by making animations as simple as possible. If you think about it, there are two kinds of animations. There are the animations where you know from the beginning exactly what will happen text/html 2013-05-29T15:25:09+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/audio_playback?rev=1369841109&do=diff Audio Playback Any decent game requires sound. Sound creates an atmosphere and pulls the player right into the game's world. Thankfully, Sparrow makes it easy to play sound. The audio engine needs to be initialized at the game's start, and stopped before the game ends. If you started your project with the latest scaffold project, this will already be done for you. text/html 2013-05-26T14:21:14+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/compiled_sprites?rev=1369578074&do=diff Compiled Sprites Compiled Sprites are called “Flattened Sprites” since Sparrow 2.0. Find out more about them here: Flattened Sprites. text/html 2013-06-28T07:20:34+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/custom_display_objects?rev=1372404034&do=diff Custom Display Objects One nice thing about Sparrow is that you can modify almost any aspect of the actual rendering process. You can not only review the code to see how it uses OpenGL to render display objects; you can actually create custom display objects with their own render methods. text/html 2013-11-08T04:30:53+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/display_objects?rev=1383885053&do=diff Display Objects A fundamental part of Sparrow is its display tree architecture. It describes how and where to draw objects on the screen. Sparrow was inspired heavily by the architecture of Adobe Flash: in fact, most classes and functions have the same names as their original Flash equivalent. text/html 2013-12-13T09:06:02+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/displaying_text?rev=1386925562&do=diff Displaying Text Displaying text is easy. The class SPTextField should be quite self explanatory. By default, it uses the system fonts of the iPhone. SPTextField *textField = [SPTextField textFieldWithWidth:145 height:80 text:@"Text" fontName:@"Helvetica" fontSize:12.0f color:0xff0000]; textField.hAlign = SPHAlignRight; // horizontal alignment textField.vAlign = SPVAlignBottom; // vertical alignment textField.border = YES; text/html 2013-05-28T13:54:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/dynamic_textures?rev=1369749265&do=diff Dynamic Textures Sparrow lets you create custom textures directly at run-time. However, we didn’t reinvent the wheel for that feature --- credit goes to the iPhone SDK, which already contains a powerful API called “Core Graphics”. You access the drawing text/html 2014-02-05T08:54:08+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/enhanced_events?rev=1391590448&do=diff Enhanced Events Simplified Event Dispatching To dispatch an event, you create an event object and pass it to the “dispatchEvent:” method --- you've seen that already. SPEvent *event = [SPEvent eventWithType:EVENT_TYPE]; [self dispatchEvent:event]; text/html 2013-05-27T10:26:06+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/event_handling?rev=1369650366&do=diff Event Handling Previously, I showed you how to create a class that displays a message box with two buttons. However, the message box lacked a critical feature: there was no way to notice when a user clicked on one of its buttons, and on which button. This can be handled with the help of Sparrow's flexible event system. If you have another look at the class hierarchy of display objects, you will notice that SPDisplayObject inherits from a class called SPEventDispatcher. Thus, each and every dis… text/html 2013-05-29T15:50:18+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/finished_part_i?rev=1369842618&do=diff Finished "Part I: The Basics" Achievement Unlocked! You have successfully finished the first major part of the manual. Congratulations! Now is the perfect time to grab a cup of coffee or eat some of the delicious chocolate cookie that is waiting for you in the kitchen. text/html 2013-05-29T15:47:07+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/finished_part_ii?rev=1369842427&do=diff Finished "Part II: Advanced Topics" Achievement Unlocked! You have successfully finished the second part of the manual. Those topics really were quite advanced --- pat yourself on the back and shave off that beard you've grown during the last hours. text/html 2013-05-29T14:13:38+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/flattened_sprites?rev=1369836818&do=diff Flattened Sprites Performance-junkies will be happy about the method “flatten” of the SPSprite class. Whenever you call that method, the class will optimize the rendering of its children so that the number of OpenGL calls that have to be executed is minimal. That means that everything will be rendered extremely fast. And I mean it text/html 2013-05-27T07:06:38+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/installation?rev=1369638398&do=diff Installation Download Download Package In order to get going you need to first download the Sparrow package. The download package contains everything you’ll need: The source code, a demo project and a scaffold for your own games. You can copy this package anywhere you want on your system. Just be sure to pick a place where it can stay constantly, because we will have to tell Xcode about its location, and you don't want to have to change that later. text/html 2016-03-07T22:29:12+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/introduction?rev=1457389752&do=diff Introduction Sparrow is written in pure Objective-C; you will need to have a basic knowledge of this language to use Sparrow. There are numerous books available that teach you the language, and there is a very good introduction available on Apple's iPhone developer page. If you have not used the language yet, fear not: if you know any other object oriented language, you will get the hang of it quickly. text/html 2013-05-27T08:58:15+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/macros?rev=1369645095&do=diff Macros Sparrow contains several handy preprocessor macros that can make your life easier. Angles Sparrow expects all angles in radians (different to Flash, which uses degrees in some places and radians in others). To convert between degrees and radians, you can use the following simple macros. text/html 2015-01-08T10:27:25+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/movie_clips?rev=1420712845&do=diff Movie Clips Sparrow contains a very lightweight movie class: SPMovieClip. You can imagine this class as an SPImage with changing textures. (As it extends SPImage, it is really just that.) Acquiring Textures It is recommended that all frames of your movie clip are from one texture atlas, and that all of them have the same size (if they have not, they will be stretched to the size of the first frame). text/html 2013-08-03T14:46:34+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/performance_optimization?rev=1375541194&do=diff Performance Optimization While Sparrow does what it can to produce games that run super-smooth, it can't do all the work for you. To achieve the best possible performance, you have to understand some key concepts of its architecture. Here is a list of best practices you can follow to have your game run as fast as possible. text/html 2013-05-25T14:13:49+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/pivot_points?rev=1369491229&do=diff Pivot Points Since Sparrow 1.2, display objects contain two additional properties: pivotX and pivotY. The pivot point of an object (also know as “origin”, “root” or “anchor”) defines the root of its coordinate system. Per default, the pivot point is at text/html 2014-07-03T08:36:46+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/project_setup?rev=1404376606&do=diff Project Setup To make it easy to create your own Xcode projects with Sparrow, the download package contains two projects that can serve as the starting point for your own games: The Barebone Project The Barebone project is the most lightweight way to set up Sparrow. It does only what is absolutely necessary: create an text/html 2013-05-29T11:30:27+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/pvr_textures?rev=1369827027&do=diff PVR Textures While PNG textures get the job done most of the time, they can be greedy when it comes to memory consumption. When your graphics memory is beginning to fill up, PVR textures might come to the rescue! PVR textures come in different flavors, some of them reducing the image quality of your textures. The following comparison shows the results of using the format to both file size and image quality. text/html 2014-01-24T10:42:02+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/setting_up_xcode?rev=1390560122&do=diff Setting up Xcode Before creating a project of your own, you have to make some preparations in Xcode. Create a Source Tree variable Sparrow is linked to your application via Xcode project references. This has the advantage that it’s easy to update Sparrow (just download a new release and overwrite the old one in the same directory) and that you can easily step into Sparrow source code, in case you want to do so. text/html 2014-02-05T08:54:43+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/start?rev=1391590483&do=diff The Sparrow Manual The Sparrow framework allows you to create interactive applications for the iPhone platform. The main target is the creation of 2D games, but Sparrow can be used for any graphical applications. Part I: The Basics This part provides an introduction to developers who want to learn the basic principles of Sparrow. If you follow these documents, you should be able to start developing your first project with Sparrow. text/html 2013-05-30T10:03:46+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/texture_formats?rev=1369908226&do=diff Texture formats There are different file formats available which can hold your textures. The format you are using can have influence on memory consumption. Size Limits Before we look at the actual formats, there is one thing you have to be aware of. Regardless of the file type, the maximum texture size is limited, depending on the device the game is running on. If you load a texture that exceeds this size, the app will crash! text/html 2013-05-30T10:39:36+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/textures_and_images?rev=1369910376&do=diff Textures and Images In the previous section, you might have noticed that we displayed an image using the SPImage object, but used an SPTexture object to set the button's image. So what is the difference between an image and a texture? Textures A texture is just the data that describes an image text/html 2013-05-31T06:18:43+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/the_barebone_project?rev=1369981123&do=diff The Barebone Project Sparrow contains two projects that can be the basis for your games. The “Barebone” project is one of it. It provides just the minimal code you need to create a Sparrow powered application; perfect to get started with Sparrow without any distractions! text/html 2015-05-27T18:30:47+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/the_scaffold_project?rev=1432751447&do=diff The Scaffold Project Don't be fooled: while the Scaffold project that comes with Sparrow doesn't look like much, it's actually extremely powerful! This section will teach you all you need to know to get started. Overview Start me up! Before we begin to modify the project, I recommend having a look at what it's capable of per default. Open it up in Xcode and start it in the simulator or on your device. It's configured as a universal app, i.e. it runs on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in full res… text/html 2014-02-05T08:54:21+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/touch_events?rev=1391590461&do=diff Touch events One of the most revolutionary features of the iPhone is that it allows you to control it with your fingers. No physical buttons, not even a stylus is required -- and you can even use several fingers simultaneously. Sparrow makes it easy for you to react to touches of one or more fingers. text/html 2015-01-29T08:42:52+00:00 Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) https://wiki.sparrow-framework.org/manual/universal_app_development?rev=1422520972&do=diff Universal App Development Sparrow's Scaffold project is preconfigured as a universal app, i.e. it runs on all iOS devices. In fact, that's the top feature of the scaffold project: to minimize the effort of creating a game that runs on all iOS devices.