iOS7 Sprite Kit how to combine interactive Sprite Nodes and interactive UIViews?

Question

I'm building a sprite kit game and have created a UIView with collection views and buttons to represent in-game inventory. From my past experience with UIView, if I add one on top of another, the top UIView would intercept touches, unless it's user interaction enabled is set to NO.

However, when I add my inventory UIView to Scene.view with user interaction set to YES, it appears that sprite nodes in my scene beneath the UIView still receive touches, or at least nodes that have user interaction enabled set to YES do.

As a result, it is possible for the user to interact with my inventory UIView, and still cause actions on the game board under the inventory. It appears that Kobold-Kit based button behaviors also act randomly with ones on one side of the screen being tappable through a UIView, while others are not. My other nodes that have touchesBegan: code do ignore the UIView on top of them.

I even tried to add another node on top of the existing scene, so it would capture all touches, but this does not seem to help in this case.

I would appreciate if someone explains how to properly combine UIViews with SKScene and SKSpriteNodes if I want some of my nodes to be interactive.

Do I need a separate scene for the inventory?
Is there a way to disable passing of touches to the scene while inventory is active?

Here's what I have so far:

-(void)didMoveToView:(SKView *)view {
    [super didMoveToView:view];

        messageConsole = [[MyTextView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(playerPortraitOffset, 768-75, 415, 75)];

    messageConsole.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
    messageConsole.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:10];
    messageConsole.textColor = [UIColor lightGrayColor];
    messageConsole.editable = NO;
    [self.view addSubview:messageConsole];

    [self.view addSubview:inventoryViewController.view];


}

UPDATE: Tested Kobold Kit's Behavior with following results:

For Top level UI elements, like Label, collection View and UIButton, they do not pass touches through
For regular UIViews and UIImageViews, they pass touches to the scene EVEN IF there is an interactive UIButton beneath them. Removing UIImage and exposing the same UIButton seems to stop touches from passing through.

LearnCocos2D LearnCocos2D · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-19T16:02:33

Using KKButtonBehavior for all interactive nodes would solve this issue.

Otherwise try setting the SKView's userInteractionEnabled to NO while you display your UIKit inventory. It should also stop other nodes with that property set from receiving touch events. If not and you don't want to use KKButtonBehavior you'd have to set each node's userInteractionEnabled to NO to ignore touch events, or add your own flag so the nodes know to ignore touch events while the inventory is up.

-(void)preventUserInteraction:(BOOL)prevent
{
//Both seem to disable touches passed to Kobold Kit behaviors under the UIView
    self.userInteractionEnabled = !prevent;


    //self.scene.userInteractionEnabled = !prevent;

}

iOS7 Sprite Kit how to combine interactive Sprite Nodes and interactive UIViews?

1 Answers