Question

So we are making a game that has a normal UIView title screen, and when the user presses the “Start Game” button, we attempt to put up the loading screen, remove the title view, we initialize the game view and add it to the superview (window in our case) underneath the loading screen.

Unfortunately, the end result is that the UI is blocked for a few seconds upon touching the “Start Game” button, and our loading screen blips on the screen for a millisecond before being kicked off for the loaded game view. We even added logging, and the logging messages appear in console while the UI is blocked.

Here is the method in question:

-(void)switchToGame{
    NSLog(@"adding loading");
    loadingScreen = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:
                 [UIImage imageNamed:@"loading_screen.jpg"]];
    [self.window addSubview:loadingScreen];

NSLog(@"removing titlescreen");
[titleView.view removeFromSuperview];
self.titleView = nil;

if(self.gameView == nil){

    gmViewController *g = [[gmViewController alloc] 
                                 initWithNibName:@"gmViewController"
                                          bundle:nil];
    self.gameView = g;
    [gameView setIsLoading:YES];
    self.gameView.parent = self;
    [g release];
}



NSLog(@"inserting gameview");
[self.window insertSubview:gameView.view belowSubview:loadingScreen];
[self.window setRootViewController:gameView];
[self setGameIsActive:YES];
[gameView startAnimation];

//remove the loading screen
NSLog(@"killing loading");
[loadingScreen removeFromSuperview];
[loadingScreen release];
[gameView setIsLoading:NO];

}

Answer 1

Forgot about this question.

We solved it by moving the loading screen add to it’s own function:

- (void)addLoadingScreen
{
    loadingScreen = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:
                 [UIImage imageNamed:@"loading_screen.jpg"]];
    [self.window addSubview:loadingScreen];
}

And then executing it on its own thread:

[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(addLoadingScreen)];