Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By : Giordano Scalzo
Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By: Giordano Scalzo

Overview of this book

Swift is no longer the unripe language it was when launched by Apple at WWDC14, now it’s a powerful and ready-for-production programming language that has empowered most new released apps. Swift is a user-friendly language with a smooth learning curve; it is safe, robust, and really flexible. Swift 2 is more powerful than ever; it introduces new ways to solve old problems, more robust error handling, and a new programming paradigm that favours composition over inheritance. Swift 2 by Example is a fast-paced, practical guide to help you learn how to develop iOS apps using Swift. Through the development of seven different iOS apps and one server app, you’ll find out how to use either the right feature of the language or the right tool to solve a given problem. We begin by introducing you to the latest features of Swift 2, further kick-starting your app development journey by building a guessing game app, followed by a memory game. It doesn’t end there, with a few more apps in store for you: a to-do list, a beautiful weather app, two games: Flappy Swift and Cube Runner, and finally an ecommerce app to top everything off. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build well-designed apps, effectively use AutoLayout, develop videogames, and build server apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Swift 2 By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Welcome to the World of Swift
2
Building a Guess the Number App
Index

Chapter 8. Cube Runner

In the last two chapters, we saw how easy it is to implement a 2D game using SpriteKit.

Most of you probably think that implementing a 3D game is something that only professional game developers can do because it requires a knowledge of 3D graphics, math, rendering, lights, and so on, as well as external tools such as Unity.

This may have been true until Apple released SceneKit, a really simple 3D rendering framework created mainly for hobbyists and casual game developers. First introduced in OS X Mountain Lion, it became even more powerful in 2014 with the addition of particle effects, physics simulations, and multipass rendering. It was added to iOS 8, allowing the community of iOS developers to implement 3D applications using a model similar to Sprite Kit and UIKit in general.

In this chapter, after a brief introduction to SceneKit using Playground, we'll implement an iOS clone of a fun Flash game.