cocos2d for iPhone

A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine

1. 

   Tim
   Member

   I've been looking for some info to give me some guidance on the usage of layers and scenes. For instance, with one of my early games I basically created a game scene class that had a single layer...and did all of the game logic within that single layer. If you exited the game back to the main menu then you were taken to another class (MenuScene), and in that case I didn't even use a layer and simply loaded all of the menu logic into the scene.

   I've looked through various posts trying to get some guidance to figure out if it is bad programming to not use layers within scenes? And should I look to perhaps break up my GameScene class to have multiple layers for various logic/activity?

   TIA

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   sowbug
   Member

   I think the CCScene and CCLayer concepts are mostly just organizational aids. I'm pretty sure you could accomplish everything you want to do with a single CCLayer -- and possibly a single CCScene. But I've found multiple CCLayers useful in two cases:

   1. I didn't want to have to worry about z-orders between two groups of objects. If my scrolling stars are always always always going to be behind everything else, it's easier to enforce that rule by putting them in a CCLayer of their own. Same with a HUD (though I could imagine some Hollywood effects where the monster eats your score).

   2. Code reuse. If you have a background theme of some kind (again, scrolling stars as an example) that you want to show in your Title scene, your About scene, your Options scene, etc., just plopping a CCLayer into every CCScene is convenient. This is circular reasoning, but you probably get what I mean.

   I don't have any opinion about putting non-CCLayer stuff into a CCScene because I've never done that.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   Tim
   Member

   Thanks for the feedback. I had basically micro managed the z-orders on the other games to deal with the HUD or backgrounds, but I like your point about easily deploying reusable layers when needed.

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   David994A
   Member

   @Tim, I did something very similar to sowbug. I have three layers; one for the scrolling background (with three parallax layer), one for the player's ship, enemy ships, weapon blasts, etc; and one for the score, level indicator, shields level, etc... I actually do most of my game logic in the scene class. The only problem I ran into with this was with handling touch events which are tied to layers so I have to pass messages from the layer with the touch events back to the scene.

   Posted 1 year ago #

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