iOS9 Sprite Kit issues

17
votes

Everything was going so well until I upgraded to xCode 7 and iOS 9....

My current project is a 2D platform game, ever since the upgrade I've fallen fowl of the sprite kit bug/errors that many of us seem to be facing.

My issue is that all sprites appear randomly in terms of their zPosition position each time the game runs on either simulator or device. I've been scouring stack for an answer without luck, so far I've tried.

  • Moving all images to .xcassets Like described here
  • Changing the iOS Development Target to iOS 9.0 under Build Settings
  • Changing all images in code to include their extension i.e. "background.png"

I still have the same problem where the images layer themselves apparently randomly, can anyone recommend a fix or some other possible solutions I may have missed?

Thank you.

4
iosswiftdebuggingsprite-kitxcode7
Just curious, do you use ignoresSiblingsOrder = true and have you set all zPositions for your nodes explicitly? - Whirlwind
I'm having a ton of issues with Sprite Kit and XCode 7 too. Changed zPositions, animations running too fast, and changed touch detection. Touches of hidden sprite nodes are not getting detected anymore. Setting alpha to 0.0 does not work either. You have to set it to something like 0.001 to make it work again. - Tobias Lott
I'm experiencing the same issues with images disappearing. In addition, I had implemented nice parallax scene transitions by not pausing the outgoing scene. This also seems broken now; both incoming and outgoing scenes are paused for me during a scene transition. - empee
This update has been disastrous for my live game. Performance has also taken a massive hit, apparently down to changes in SKCropNodes. And all Apple ever respond with is 'Please create a bug report'. - Smikey
@TobiasLott Sprite Kit touch/nodes detection no longer recognizes a node with 0 alpha, but a better solution is to set it to 1 alpha, with color UIColor.clearColor(). - Naftali Beder

4 Answers

15
votes

SpriteKit in iOS 9 GM is VERY broken. I don't know what they did at Apple, but a couple of people should be fired. Take a look at all the complaints here : https://forums.developer.apple.com

My issue, for one, is that when I load an SKSpriteNode through the imageNamed init function, sometimes the sprites appear, sometimes they don't. I am using device-specific images, and sometimes the SAME line of code will load Rock@2x~ipad.png which will appear because it's my device-specific image, sometimes it will load Rock.png, which won't appear because I haven't included universal images.

I have reported this bug to Apple and they haven't fixed it yet. They're asking me for test scenarios, I have explained them 3 times in different manners and I'm getting short on explanations here.

All I can do at this point is tell you to report these bugs ASAP to Apple, and cross your fingers someone intelligent will read your bug report and do something with it.

8
votes

As @tobias-lott mentioned in his comment I've had to bow include zPosition to every Sprite rather then letting the code order the sprites.

5
votes

I had the same issue with random zPositions, then I noticed the following in GameViewController.swift:

/* Sprite Kit applies additional optimizations to improve rendering performance */
skView.ignoresSiblingOrder = true

Changing ignoresSiblingOrder to false fixed the problem for me.

-3
votes

The best way for you is that you download the Xcode 7 and rebuild your app and deal with the building problem.

with the launch of iOS 9 Some deprecated API were removed from iOS 9,which make app crashed.!

I think the same is happening at your side also.

You can find all the latest change here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General/iOS90APIDiffs/index.html

Build you app with xcode 7 and swift 2.0.