Hey all,

I'm currently programming a sliding block puzzle, and am having a bit of trouble finding any specific layering attribute for an image.

For example, if I have a gameboard and a series of pieces, how do I tell Interface Builder that I want the pieces to always appear above the gameboard, and never below? Is this something I can take care of with Quartz, or should I look into OpenGL?

Thanks so much,

~Sam

I have about 4 different responses to this. It's hard to pick one so I'll just kinda jumble them.


The primary way Cocoa handles layering is parent/child via superview/subview. Leopard added some control over the draw order of sibling views.

You could use separate views for your game, but I wouldn't. <Insert reasons here>

A simple sliding puzzle like yours, can easily be done in a single view using Quartz, Core Animation with multiple layers, or OpenGL.

Any of them is capable for this, but I'd go probably with Core Animation layers. You could use OpenGL if you wanted, but you certainly don't need to.


There's my non-answer answer.

Seth, thanks for the note, I decided to go with Core Animation with multiple layers for this one. It's working pretty well--I'm having some trouble constraining the sub-CALayers with respect to the gameboard CALayer, since I can't implement a layoutManager on the iPhone, but I'm slowly hacking away at this issue.

Cheers,

~Sam Ritchie