Need a better approach for a reaction style game

[davejas69]

I have an idea for a reaction style game, the basic idea of which is that an image such as
a cherry or an apple displays for a short time and it is up to the player to tap a button or miss
tapping the button and losing a point of health.

The way I have done it is to have an array, in this case a switch-case juggle between methods...


How it works is, there is an variable at the start of the game that is set to 0. The button for each image is
made visible while the timer is running and the player is supposed to tap it. The IBAction for the button
simply changes the variable to "1" and the method checks for a 1 or a 0 to see if the button had been
pressed in the alloted time or not.




However, it runs really jerky and sporadic. Wondering if there is a better way of doing this.

[smasher]

You need to figure out what your choke point is -- loading the images, or setting the .image property -- and start doing that up front when your game loads.

Loading the images earlier and setting gameImage.image = [imageArray objectAtIndex: n] may speed things up, or you may have to create multiple UIImagViews and show/hide them instead of changing the .image property.

On the style side, if rNumber was an instance variable then you could have a single fruitMethod instead of three different methods, and cut down on duplicate code. Also, you have multiple timers and you're not saving pointers to any of them, so you'll have trouble canceling them if you ever need to dealloc this view. Finally, creating a series of non-repeating timers will not be as smooth as a single repeating timer calling a gameUpdate method.

Hope this helps.

[davejas69]

This does help. I think that calling the non repeating timers was causing
the jerkiness. I haven't rewritten this completely yet but am I on the
right track?

[mobileben]

What you really want to do is use a one main timer that feeds the rest of your game approach. Something where you set up your base timer once with something like:

timerBasedLoopTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:1.0F / 60.0F target:self selector:@selector(timerBasedLoop) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];

And then your timerBasedLoop (in the example above), calls your game loop. That game loop should then call everyone else. Your best bet is to have that base game loop keep track of the time. It can also decide if things need stuff at a different rate (eg. refresh every 1 sec versus every 1/30th of a sec).

The real trick, which most beginners and frankly even some "pros" don't want to do is use frame independent code. This means using time to do everything rather than the number of frames that have occurred.