Sprite Kit is the novel iOS 7 framework and is given the name after the Sprites which are nothing but individual elements in any video game that are animated over a different background layer for instance you can consider the Pac Mac & the Devils which chase the Pac Mac or the Alien Ships in Space as the Sprites.
Along with the animating sprites that consist of other media elements such as the video and text inside a scene the Sprite Kit iOS Framework as well helps in simulating realistic physics for depicting the inertia and the force of gravity in Motion of Balls Bouncing Off the Billiard Table or in the Cut the Rope game. You can as well generate the particle effects just like that in the case of Motion. Sprite Kit provides a great level of framework for the game developers so that they can easily animate their game artwork on the screen devoid of having to have the advanced knowledge on the underlying OpenGL code concepts with abstracts below it so that they can run at a very lower level on the device’s graphics processor cores. This is the reason why Sprite Kit is compared to be on the same level with the Core Animation Framework which was introduced by Apple with iPhone for letting the app developers build various graphic effects and smooth transitions devoid of having to have enhanced knowledge on the specialized and complex GPU programming that is involved with coding the raw OpenGL.
Concept behind Sprite Kit iOS Framework
The main concept behind the Sprite Kit framework is nothing new, iOS web developers can make use of one among the third party gaming frameworks such as the Cocoas so as to acquire similar kind of functionality. Nevertheless by creating the novel Sprite Kit framework Apple has not merely got the ability to strongly integrate the framework with the various XCode Web Development Tools however it as well can now be assured that the web developers will have access to all the tools which will exist in future and are likely to grow in the direction in which Apple desires.
With the innovation of the Sprite Kit framework Apple has reduced its dependency on various third party frameworks for supplying various strategic components of its platform as and when possible. With the launch of the Sprite Kit frameworks now Apple can ensure that the web developers need not suffer anymore with the compatibility problems with the latest iOS software releases. Sprite Kit framework will work well with all the latest versions of XCode , OS X , iOS and any other software Apple changes. This framework is highly beginner friendly and is typically well designed, sleek application programming interface and trimmed which is what is expected from Apple.
The excellent documentation of Apple which is at all times complete and up-to-date makes it more stable and as well gives a prediction that the web developer’s half life of knowledge is going to increase with time. This framework will offer different tools for modifying the bounding volumes, geometry and the various materials that are used in the scene which act as a middleware between the higher level frameworks such as the Core Animation and the low level Open GL.
If you want to animate the sprites or the arbitrary textured images then there is an animation infrastructure and graphics rendering mechanism provided by Sprite Kit. This framework makes use of a conventional rendering loop wherein the contents of each of the frame will be processed much before the frame is rendered. Your game will actually determine the contents of the scene and as well let you know how you can make changes to the content within each frame. Sprite Kit achieves the rendering of the animation frames through the graphics hardware in an efficient manner. This framework is optimized to a great extent so that it is easy for the developers to make changes to the positions of sprites inside the animation frame.
This framework has wide range of functionality support which can be useful for web games such as Physics Simulation, Basic Sound Playback Support, etc. Not only this XCode as well renders additional in built support for the Sprite Kit so that one can build complicated and sophisticated special effects. To conclude with we can say that the combination of various sophisticated tools and framework makes Sprite Kit an ideal choice for games and other applications that will need similar sorts of animations.