Doodle Blast! - Day 6 - Global Scores

Stats: 66 code files, 5811 lines of code, 6 textures, 247 world flags, 21 sounds

Today, I mostly played with global scores. iPhone has a very sexy control called UITableView. It is essentially a scrollable table of items with lots of possibilities for customization, supporting both linear and hierarchical data visualization. The trouble is that if you want to use all this goodness, you need to learn it first and that takes time. Fortunately for me, Apple has some pretty good documentation about it along with some fun sample code. Plus I found some even more interesting tutorial online. Good thing we have the internet!

Then I had to make sure that the table of scores showed up in Cocos2D mixed in with all the OpenGL goodness. Once again, I was in luck – lots of samples and, actually, a very clean way of doing it:

_tableController = [[ScoreTableController alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewStylePlain];

UITableView* table = _tableController.tableView;

[[[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView] addSubview:table];

I wrote a custom ScoreTableController that subclasses UITableViewController and deals with all the custom display logic. Then I simply added the table that the controller manages as a sub-view of the root OpenGL view. I love it when frameworks actually make your life easier.

The one glitch I ran into was fading. The page that hosted the table view fades in and out of black when it first appears as well as when the user navigates back to the main menu. Cocos2D has a nice set of transitions built into it. However, the table wasn’t part of the OpenGL world and, hence, it was completely independent as far as fading was concerned. So what I ended up doing was fading in the table after the background was already fully there and, vice-versa, fading out the table before fading out the rest of the background. If you look for it in the final product, you can see it, but most people don’t notice.