Question

I have been building a game in cocos for a while now I it has just occurred to me that it might just be a whole lot easier to use UIKit.

Could you please help me weight up the pros and cons, and share some experiences you have.

Here is my basic list of advantages for each. I feel I dont know enought about cocos to make a informed decision which is best.

Cocos

• Game engine comes for free. Pause / resume callbacks every frame
• Sprite animations
• Uses open GL (is this true? is this an advantage?)
• …Help me think of some more!

UI Kit

• Far more Help / Documentation / Sample Code
• Familiar for iPhone programmers
• Easy to handel touch
• Easy view animations
• Easy to customise
• Faster loading times? (is this true?)

Any feedback would be great!

EDIT: I have just seen a developer video (on an open GL game called Quest) where they used UI Kit for the UI elements, drawn over the top of the GL View. Is this possible / practical with cocos?

Answer 1

1. Cocos2d uses OpenGL for drawing its sprites, movements, and particles. Trying to use Quartz/Core Graphics (which is NOT accelerated!) is fundamentally much slower and power hungry.
2. Cocos2d is a sprite library with a scenegraph first and foremost. You would be duplicating effort to make a scenegraph using UIKit.
3. There are lots of nice freebies that work within Cocos which you would have to develop from the ground up.

So, in short: It draws way faster than CPU bound drawing calls, it provides 95% of what most sprite based games need without reinventing the same thing over and over, and is free.