I spent more time that I care to admit figuring out how to reconcile my old Dungeonators code with Apple’s Sprite Kit, Retina displays, and iOS 7. Along the way I searched the web for help and ran into tons of tutorials and advice for indy game developers (I highly recommend www.raywenderlich.com for a great set of systematic and well written tutorials). But I learned to be wary of advice on some sites that is confused or actually wrong. For example I came across this macro in one of Ray’s tutorials that originated from a Stack Overflow conversation:
#define IS_WIDESCREEN ( fabs( ( double )[ [ UIScreen mainScreen ] bounds ].size.height - ( double )568 ) < DBL_EPSILON )
This macro was written by a floating point math C macro professional. It’s used to determine if the resolution of an iPhone screen is 4 inches. iOS 7 only runs on iPhone’s with Retina displays but there are still millions of iPhone 4 and 4s models in use with 3.5 inch screens. The iPhone 5, 5c, and 5s has a widescreen of 4 inches.
But why do I need a fancy macro for that? It’s code that I’m only going to run once. And it’s not a particularly CPU intensive calculation. And really, I want to understand what every line of code in my game does. Copy and paste code is always a bad idea.
It’s not hard to figure out what this macro does: It gets the height of the screen, subtracts the resolution of the 4 inch iPhone from it and makes sure the result is less than a number that is as close to zero as the phone’s floating point system can represent. However, there is no reason that we have to go to this level of complexity!
My feeling about macros is that you almost never need to use them. And if you do, call in a pro C programmer. Macros can optimize your code but if you don’t use the right number of parens you could end up with subtle side effects and bugs that are hard to track down.
As an added bonus this macro is only useful if you have determined that the iOS device your game is running on is an iPhone. Taken out of context this speedy line of code could give your game the wrong idea.
To do it right, as in doing it with code that is safe, maintainable, and as efficient as it needs to be, you have to understand how Apple internally represents the resolution of an iOS device. (I’m assuming you want your game to be universal across the Apple universe.)
So let’s say you want to write a universal iOS game in Objective-C using Sprite Kit. Here are the consequences of your decision:
- Your game can only run on iOS devices running iOS7. This fact eliminates the original non-Retina iPhones but not non-Retina iPads
- Your game must support both 3.5 and 4 inch iPhones.
- Your game must support iPad and iPad Retina devices.
- Don’t worry about model names! The name of the device (iPad, iPad Air, iPhone 5, iPhone 4s, iPadophone 7xyz) doesn’t tell you anything reliable about the number of pixels you have to play with.
Here’s the non-obvious part: You’re going to create your game with pixels in mind but Apple is going to give coordinates in points. I wish Apple had not done it this way. I guess they were trying to be helpful. At lest let developers turn of the points paradigm if like me, they find it unhelpful. But we can’t turn it off so we have to live with it!
Apple says there are 2 pixels in a point. This table should help:
Device Type Pixels Points Models iPhone 3.5" 960 x 640 480 x 320 iPhone 4, 4s iPhone 4" 1136 x 640 568 x 320 iPhone 5, 5c, 5s iPad 1024 x 768 1024 x 768 iPad, iPad Mini iPad Retina 2048 x 1536 1024 x 768 iPad with Retina
Apple gives us a macro of it’s own to figure out if we’re running on an iPhone or iPad, UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() and a way to discover the screen’s dimensions in points,
[UIScreen mainScreen].bounds.size.height
Thus, here is a simple method that you can add to your game projects to figure out what sort of iOS device you’re running on based on it’s screen real estate.
- (NSString *)figureOutScreen {
// Call once during initialization!
NSString *result;
if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPhone) {
// iPhone
if ([UIScreen mainScreen].bounds.size.height==568.0f) {
// iPhone Retina 4-inch
result = @"iPhone Retina 4-inch";
} else {
// iPhone filename 3.5-inch
result = @"iPhone Retina 3.5-inch";
}
} else {
// iPad (Can't tell if it is mini, standard, or Retina 'cause all the dimensions in points are the same
result = @"iPad";
}
return result;
}