Ooops, my bad, I forgot to import the files I needed :(

But anyway, if anyone can upload my file to the Cocos2D GitHub I will be very grateful if you could PM me :)

Thanks :D

nvm, i figured it out. Put the quotes into an NSArray and then had a sprite get an object at the randomly picked index number.

I'm trying to do a bit of splash text on the opening screen of my game, like the Minecraft opening text, but I'm too new to cocos2d to figure this out. Right now I've written the CCLabelBMFont lines for all the quotes I'd like to put on and numbered them (quote0-quote5) and I have arc4random() drawing a random number, but I'm don't know how to put these together to call the random quote. I know there's a more elegant way to do it than just an if statement for each random number. Plist? Array? Help?

*bump* :)

Quick note... if you help with getting the CCMenuItem thing to work, you don't necessarily have to help me with uploading stuff to Github.

Hi.
For the past few months, on my menus I have been using a piece of code similar to this to go from one scene to another:

-(void)backToMainMenu:(id)sender
{
	MainMenuScene *mms = [MainMenuScene node];
	[[CCDirector sharedDirector]replaceScene:mms];
}

This has worked in many other places inside my app, but it doesn't work now. Can someone please explain this to me.

Here is some more code to help:

CCMenuItemLabel * backToMainMenu = [CCMenuItemLabel itemWithLabel:backToMainMenuLabel target:self selector:@selector(backToMainMenu:)];

I have tried putting 'selector' on the end instead of 'sender'.

Another thing, yesterday, I created more defined colours in the ccTypes file. These all work wonderfully, so now there is a wider choice of colours to use. I would like to upload it to Github, but I can't. Is there anyone who I can send it to so it can be uploaded (I would be most grateful if someone could).

Thanks.

EDIT : I tested my code on the 1.0.1 version :)

CCLabelBMFont?

You could use a glyph program to make a BM font (eg. Glyph Desginer: http://glyphdesigner.71squared.com/), and make your fancy font and what not... and put a drop shadow on THAT... this way you can still have non-UILabel material, WITH a drop shadow

edit: another (free) version is Hiero (or something like that), iirc

You could always just render 2 CCLabelTTFs, one white, the other black, and render the black one behind the white one offset by a couple of pixels. It's a hack, but it's surely easier than trying to get a UILabel to play nicely with cocos2d, especially if you need it to z-sort with any of your cocos2d layers/sprites, or want to use any cocos2d scene transitions while displaying the label.

I think to add a UILabel on top of cocos2d is not a good idea, I understand when you don't have another option, like a date picker or an input text, but labels are very well implemented on cocos2d and mixing UIKit elements and cocos2d may impact performance if used in-game. You better off using this:

https://github.com/jandrad/CCLabelFX

It works pretty well and adds a nice drop shadow effect.

The problem is that CCLabelTTF does not support drop shadow, and my custom label depends on drop shaddow. Thanks for your answer. I will look into CCUIviewwrapper. what is the disatvantage of CCUIviewwrapper?

You can use something like CCUIviewwrapper, but I would totally advise not adding UIView elements just for a label. You might be better off customizing the CCLabelTTF code that renders the texture to match what your custom UILabel renders.

Is there a easy way to add a UILabel to a layer? I do not want to use the Coco2d label (CCLabelTTF) because I wrote my own custom class that overrides UILabel and I want to use that instead. Thanks

Thanks mavrik5150, I do something similar for sprites. Do CCLabelAtlas's need cleanup?

Although not exactly the same as what you have listed I have a part of the game in which multiple sprites continue to show on the screen, but like you once they either make contact or leave the screen I want to remove that sprite instead of just having it hang out in memory. I did this below, maybe it can give you some ideas on what to do

NSMutableArray *objectsToDelete = [NSMutableArray alloc] init];

//after the sprite collision detection is ran I add that sprite to the array
[objectsToDelete addObjects:sprite];

//then in the end of my update area I have this part of code

for (CCSprite *object in objectsToDelete) {
[self removeChild:object cleanup:YES];
}

[objectsToDelete release];

You would probably want to change the CCSprite to CCLabelTTF but basically all I'm doing is for every sprite that needs to be removed from the screen I add that sprite to my array and then let the array determine how many objects need to be removed from the screen. Since my spawn method just adds a new sprite object to the scene when needed this seemed to be the best option both visually and performance wise.

Another scheme I was thinking of was to define an array in my header file and alloc/fill it up when my menu is showing and release it when it goes away.

I'm eventually going to make the switch to a bitmap font. But in the lifetime of a scene, the best way I could figure out to get rid of a label is to just give it a string value of " ".

I'd like to know more as well. From initially looking, the CCLabelTTF creates a texture for the text but it doesn't look like it makes its way to the shared texture cache (am I wrong on this?). If it doesn't, the texture should discard once the label is destroyed. If you're keeping several hundred instances, then you'll probably have several hundred textures sitting in memory (1 for each label).

With that many, is it possible you can use a font atlas (bitmap font) to cut down the textures? I stay with the CCLabelTTF because I need to control the font size dynamically, but I don't carry very many at any one time.

In my game now I have plenty of CCLabelTTF's. Names of labels point to it in my header file, and that design makes sense to me. I'm at a point now where I sometimes have a menu display over the paused game, and it will have x amount of labels. There may up to 40-50 of them, who knows. I'm not really sure how to proceed with this in the most organized way, but I'm confused whether or not CCLabelTTF's could ever be temporary and then all be released when that menu goes away. The way I handle getting rid of the labels now is just setting the string to a space " " which I know is probably really ghetto and not the proper procedure. Furthermore, those labels still exist. I know they don't take up a lot of resources, but if I'm going to have an upward of 200 of them or more (not all displaying all at once of course), I don't just want them hanging around.

Found the culprit... Seems to be a glitch in the CCMoveBy function that only affects characters within a label...

Also, why aren't the image tags working in the forum?

I am currently animating each character in a CCLabelBMFont. Sometimes when the animation finishes, the label can end up looking weird. Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this?

double totalTime = 1.0f;
int currentCharIndex = 0;
CCMenu* _menu = (CCMenu*)[self getChildByTag:kNodeTagLabelMenu];
CCNode* _node;
CCARRAY_FOREACH([_menu children], _node) {
    CCNode* _labelNode;
    CCARRAY_FOREACH([_node children], _labelNode) {
        double individualTime = totalTime / [[_labelNode children] count];
        CCNode* _charNode;
        CCARRAY_FOREACH([_labelNode children], _charNode) {
            _charNode.scale = 0.5;
            [_charNode runAction:[CCSequence actions:[CCDelayTime actionWithDuration:individualTime * currentCharIndex],
                                                     [CCSpawn actions:[CCScaleTo actionWithDuration:0.1f scale:1.0],
                                                                      [CCFadeIn actionWithDuration:0.1f],
                                                                      [CCMoveBy actionWithDuration:0.1f position:ccp(0, -20)],
                                                                      nil],
                                                     nil]];

            currentCharIndex++;
        }
        currentCharIndex = 0;
    }
}

The animation always runs successfully and looks great.
However, sometimes the end of the animation looks like this: (yay!)
[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/330xquc.jpg[/IMG]

And then sometimes it looks like this: (boo!)
[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/ohllc0.jpg[/IMG]

Problem solved, thanks to Jamorn. I have to create new sprite object to implement into individual Menuitems

@barry I've found my mistake, forgot to change "normalImage" to "normalSprite". but the problem now it is that i couldn't have multiple CCMenuItemLabelAndSprite objects. if i have more than one it'll crash the game with

Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'child already added. It can't be added again'

anybody?

@barry i implement your code into my project, but i couldn't get it working. It's giving me class method not found warning in the implementation right in CCMenuItemLabelAndSprite *resetGame.

this is how i implement it

CCSprite* uniButton = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"uni-button.png"];
CCSprite* uniButtonOver = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"uni-button.png"];
[uniButtonOver setColor:ccc3(128, 128, 128)];

CCLabelBMFont* resetLabel = [CCLabelBMFont labelWithString:@"Reset Game" fntFile:@"rumpel.fnt"];
resetLabel.anchorPoint = CGPointMake(0.5f,0.7);
CCMenuItemLabelAndSprite *resetGame = [CCMenuItemLabelAndSprite itemFromLabel:resetLabel normalImage:uniButton selectedImage:uniButtonOver target:self selector:nil];

Hey Bill,

Thanks for getting back to me and all of your work on cocos3d. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong, but I ended up doing this in the makeWorld function and it worked:

- (CC3World *)makeWorld
{
	CubeWorld* world = [CubeWorld world];
    // Make a simple box template available. Only 6 faces per node.
    CC3BoxNode *mn = [CC3BoxNode nodeWithName:kBoxName];
    CC3BoundingBox bBox;
    bBox.minimum = cc3v(-100.0f, -100.0f, -100.0f);
    bBox.maximum = cc3v( 100.0f,  100.0f,  100.0f);
    mn.uniformScale = 5.0f;
    mn.material = [CC3Material material];
    mn.isTouchEnabled = YES;
    CCLabelTTF *testLabel = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"Front"
                                               fontName:kStandardFontName
                                               fontSize:30.0f];
    CC3Billboard *bb = [CC3Billboard nodeWithName:@"FrontBB" withBillboard:testLabel];
    bb.color = ccWHITE;
    bb.zOrder = -1;
    bb.location = cc3v(0.0, 0.0, 100.0);
    [mn addChild:bb];
    testLabel = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"Right Side"
                                   fontName:kStandardFontName
                                   fontSize:30.0f];
    bb = [CC3Billboard nodeWithName:@"RightSideBB" withBillboard:testLabel];
    bb.color = ccWHITE;
    bb.zOrder = -1;
    bb.location = cc3v(100.0f, 0.0, 0.0f);
    bb.rotation = cc3v(0.0f, 90.0f, 0.0f);
    [mn addChild:bb];
    testLabel = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"Back Side"
                                   fontName:kStandardFontName
                                   fontSize:30.0f];
    bb = [CC3Billboard nodeWithName:@"BackSideBB" withBillboard:testLabel];
    bb.color = ccWHITE;
    bb.zOrder = -1;
    bb.location = cc3v(0.0f, 0.0, -100.0f);
    bb.rotation = cc3v(0.0f, 180.0f, 0.0f);
    [mn addChild:bb];
    testLabel = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"Left Side"
                                   fontName:kStandardFontName
                                   fontSize:30.0f];
    bb = [CC3Billboard nodeWithName:@"LeftSideBB" withBillboard:testLabel];
    bb.color = ccWHITE;
    bb.zOrder = -1;
    bb.location = cc3v(-100.0f, 0.0, 0.0f);
    bb.rotation = cc3v(0.0f, -90.0f, 0.0f);
    [mn addChild:bb];
    [mn populateAsSolidBox:bBox];
	world.mainNode = mn;
	[world createGLBuffers];
	return world;
}

@jarodl

Are you encountering a problem?

If so, please describe a bit more about what you are trying to do, and what, specifically, is going wrong.

From a quick look at your code, and your requirement that the perspective changes, you probably don't want to set shouldDrawAs2DOverlay set to YES. Have a look at the documentation for the properties you are setting, and have a look at the billboards used in the CC3DemoMashUp, specifically the sign carried by the robot arm...which appears in the correct perspective. But skip the camera tracker part of that sign, since you want it to rotate with the box it's on.

...Bill

I'm trying to add a CCSprite and a CCLabelTTF to the side of a cube and have it use the proper perspective as it rotates. I started by trying to add a CC3Billboard to the side of a CC3BoxNode.

// Make a simple box template available. Only 6 faces per node.
CC3BoxNode *mn = [CC3BoxNode nodeWithName:kBoxName];
CC3BoundingBox bBox;
bBox.minimum = cc3v(-100.0f, -100.0f, -100.0f);
bBox.maximum = cc3v( 100.0f,  100.0f,  100.0f);
mn.uniformScale = 5.0f;
mn.material = [CC3Material material];
mn.isTouchEnabled = YES;
CCLabelTTF *testLabel = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"TestBB"
                                           fontName:kStandardFontName
                                             fontSize:30.0f];
CC3Billboard *bb = [CC3Billboard nodeWithName:@"TestBB" withBillboard:testLabel];
bb.color = ccYELLOW;
bb.shouldUseLighting = NO;
bb.zOrder = -1;
bb.shouldDrawAs2DOverlay = YES;
bb.location = cc3v( 0.0, 80.0, 0.0 );
bb.unityScaleDistance = 425.0;
bb.offsetPosition = ccp( 0.0, 15.0 );
[mn addChild:bb];
[mn populateAsSolidBox:bBox];

I'm using the sample project titled CC3Demo3DTiles as a starting point and not much else has changed. I'm doing this in the initializeTemplates method.

what is the file name of your font?
what is the name that shows up in FontBook?
which one are you passing to UIFont?

if my translator translated it right:
word wrap == \n or not?

Did you get anywhere with getting labelBMFonts to word wrap? I need to do this