Show UIView in front of SKView - iOS - SpriteKit

Question

I have a simple little Sprite Kit game for iOS. I am trying to get my UIView (which contains main menu buttons/title) to appear above the SKView where some nice moving animations are happening. This is not for game play, that is on a separate view.

I have setup a UIView (which has its class set to SKView) and another UIView onto of that which has all the UIButtons and the game title.

However, I can't seem to get the SKView to appear above my UIView which contains the buttons/title.

The general reason as to why I am trying to do this is that on the main menu I want some nice continuous animations to happen in the background as a sort of nice effect while the user decides to select whichever button. I can just try and do the animations which some methods and very basic UIView Animation code, but then the UI gets blocked and its just a pain to get it to work, thus SpriteKit animation is much much better and smoother.

Here is how I'm trying to do it:

// In header file:
IBOutlet UIView *anim_view;

// In implementation file:
// Configure the view.
SKView *skView = (SKView *)anim_view;
// Instead of ... self.view ... I have anim_view    

skView.showsFPS = NO;
skView.showsNodeCount = NO;

// Create and configure the scene.
SKScene *scene = [MyScene sceneWithSize:skView.bounds.size];
scene.scaleMode = SKSceneScaleModeAspectFill;

// Present the scene.
[skView presentScene:scene];

In my storyboard file I have two UIViews as I talked about like so:

Storyboard UIView setup image

How can I get around this issue?

Thanks for your time, Dan.

Which way is it? The UIView on top of the SKView (this should work) or the SKView on top of the UIView (this won't work because you can't make a SKView 'transparent')? — LearnCocos2D
That is not possible. Unlike Cocos2D's view the Sprite Kit SKView can't be made transparent (see-through). — LearnCocos2D

MetaMagnate MetaMagnate · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-22T22:33:20

SKView is based on UIView, just swap between them rather than trying to stack them up.

[UIView transitionFromView:self.view toView:MySecondView duration:0.25 options:UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionCrossDissolve completion:^(BOOL finished) {
    // What to do when its finished.
}];

See this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11848297/183

Show UIView in front of SKView - iOS - SpriteKit

1 Answers