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screencapturekit
I have code that captures a window and displays a cropped image. The problem is 2 fold. Kit doesn't seem to allow to modify stop and recapture image in window mode to capture a portion of the screen. So this makes me having to crop and display the cropped image via a published variable. This all works find. But seems to stop after some time. Using an M1 16gig ram. program is taking less than 100meg of mem with 40-70%cpu as the crow flies. printing captured success in debug mode and sometimes frame isn't valid so guarding against it. any ideas on how to improve my strategy?
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92
Jun ’25
jpegData(compressionQuality:) background crash on iOS18
Ever since the release of iOS18, we've been seeing a new crash related to calling jpegData(compressionQuality:). From reports, this isn't crashing during foreground usage of the app, but instead will prompt the user about a background app crash upon foregrounding. The stacks from crash reports show this crash is happening from a variety of callers, but all go through jpegData(compressionQuality:), down through [HDRImageConverter_Metal init] and end up in apthread_mutex_local call when it crashes. Attached is a sample crash report from 18.2(22C5125e), but we've been seeing this since the first iOS18 release. Did something change with around these calls in iOS18 that prohibits their use in the background? crash.txt
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678
Nov ’24
Achievement Banners Not always Showing
When running on my iPhone SE3 under IOS 18.4.1, achievement banners show as expected. The same code running on my iPad Air2 under IOS 15.8.4, achievement banners do not show, but they are accepted (as shown in the GameCenterViewController). The banners also don't show when running the simulator under iPhone 16 Pro Max under IOS 18.2 or simulator under iPhone SE3 under IOS 18.3. I haven't tried others. [Note that I clear the achievements each run during test so that I can duplicate this]
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58
May ’25
Bone deformation
I have been tasked with creating content for the Apple Vision Pro. Just the 3D content and animation, not the programming end of things. I can't seem to get any kind of mesh deformation animation to import into Reality Composer Pro. By that I mean bones/skin, or even point cache. I work on PC, and my main software is 3DS Max, but I'm borrowing an iMac for this job, and was instructed to use RCP on it for testing before handing things off to the programmer. My files open and play fine in other USD programs, like Omniverse, or USD View, just not Reality Composer Pro. I've seen the dinosaur demo in AVP, so I know mesh deformation is possible. If there are other essential tools that might make this possible, I have not been made aware of them. I am experimenting with bouncing things off of Blender, in case that exports better, but not really having luck there either -though my results are different. Thanks.
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58
5d
Can you delete a MTLLibrary once shaders are placed into pipeline?
Hello, I am quite new to using the metal API and was wondering if it was common (or even possible) if you knew that, when a pipeline was created, you never needed to make another one with the same shaders again, if it is safe to release the library the was used to reference the shaders? Only asking because this is possible in other apis, but apple never mentions (as far as I have found) if this is safe or not safe to do.
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133
19h
Is there a way to get all the turnbasematches that can join
I am using Unity's GameKit to implement a turnbase game. I want to make a UI in Unity to show all the games I can join. I tried using var matches = await GKTurnBasedMatch.LoadMatches(); to get all the open matches. But it seems that I can only get the matcm related to the current apple account. Can you help me get all the matches? ALSO I used var match = await GKTurnBasedMatchmakerViewController.Request(request); to exit the gamecenter interface and start a game (automatic matching, no one was invited) Another device used var match = await GKTurnBasedMatch.Find(request); to find the game, but it did not find the game, but it start a new game (automatic matching). Can you help me solve these problems?
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181
Mar ’25
Render to multiple offscreen images with SCNRenderer
I am trying to extract some built-in and custom render passes from SceneKit, so that I can pass them into a metal pipeline and do some additional work with them. I have a metal viewport, and have instantiated a SCNRenderer so that I can render a SCNScene using SceneKit to a texture as part of my metal draw pass. This works as expected. Now I want to output multiple textures from the SceneKit render, not just the final color. I want to extract Depth, Normal, Lighting, Colour and a custom SCNTechnique for world position. I can easily use a SCNTechnique to render one of these to the color output, but it's not clear how I would render multiple passes in one render call. Is there some way to pass a writeable buffer/texture to a SCNTechnique, so that I can populate it in my SCNTechnique shader at render time with the output from the pass? Similar to how one would bind a buffer for a metal shader. SCNTechnique obfuscates things, so it's not clear how to proceed. Does anyone have any ideas?
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603
Dec ’24
RealityView Attachments on iOS 18 & Visually Appealing AR Labeling Alternatives
I want use SwiftUI views as RealityKit entities to display AR Labels within a RealityKit scene, and the labels could be more complicated than just text and window as they might include images, dynamic texts, animations, WebViews, etc. Vision OS enables this through RealityView attachments, and there is a RealityView support on iOS 18. Tried running RealityView attachments code samples from VisionOS on iOS 18. However, the code below gives errors on iOS 18: import SwiftUI import RealityKit struct PassportRealityView: View { let qrCodeCenter: SIMD3<Float> let assetID: String var body: some View { RealityView { content, attachments in // Setup your AR content, such as markers or 3D models if let qrAnchor = try? await Entity(named: "QRAnchor") { qrAnchor.position = qrCodeCenter content.add(qrAnchor) } } attachments: { Attachment(id: "passportTextAttachment") { Text(assetID) .font(.title3) .foregroundColor(.white) .background(Color.black.opacity(0.7)) .padding(5) .cornerRadius(5) } } .frame(width: 300, height: 400) } } When I remove "attachments" keyword and the block, the errors are kind of gone. That does not help me as I want to attach SwiftUI views to Anchor Entities in RealityKit. As I understand, RealityView attachments are not supported on iOS 18. I wonder if there is any way of showing SwiftUI views as entities on iOS 18 at this point. Or am I forced to use the text meshes and 3d planes to build the UI? I checked out the RealityUI plugin, but it's too simple for my use case of building complex AR labels. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
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624
Nov ’24
EXC_BREAKPOINT, QuartzCore , Crash CA::Render::Image::new_image
We are seeing crashes in Xcode organizer. So far we are not able to reproduce them locally. They affect multiple app releases (some older, built with Xcode 15.x and newer built with Xcode 16.0). They only affect iOS 18.5. Is there anything that changed in latest iOS? It's hard to tell what exactly is causing this crash because setting symbolic breakpoint on CA::Render::Image::new_image(unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned int, CGColorSpace*, void const*, unsigned long const*, void (*)(void const*, void*), void*) triggers this breakpoint all the time, but not necessarily with exactly the previous stack frames matching the crash report. Is it a known issue? crash.crash Thank you.
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242
Jul ’25
Unreal Engine SocketIO crash
I’m trying to build my project using Unreal Engine 5.4 for iOS. I use SocketIO to connect to the backend. The plugin SocketIOClient version 2.8.0, is used for this. When trying to connect to the socket, a crash occurs. This only happens on iOS, only in Distribution builds, and only on Unreal 5.4. There are no problems on Unreal 5.2. Callstack: crashlog.crash The callstack may be slightly different, but the problem is always when allocating or deallocating memory. I suspect that this may be a race condition and is related to some peculiarities of working with memory on iOS. There are also several similar issues in the plugin repository, for example this one. I tried using other versions of plugin, other versions of xcode, tried to build socket io using both c++20 and c++17, nothing helps. Does anyone know what can be done about this?
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540
Nov ’24
Slow compilation
Hi, I am working with a large project. We are compiling each material to its own .metallib. They all include many common files full of inline functions. Finally we link it all together at the end with a single big pathtrace kernel. Everything works as expected, however the compile times have gotten completely out of hand and it takes multiple minutes to compile at runtime (to native code). I have gathered that I can do this offline by using metal-tt however if I am wondering if there is a way to reduce the compile times in such a scenario, and how to investigate what the root cause of the problem is. I suspect it could have to do with the fact that every materials metallib contains duplications of all the inline functions. Any ideas on how to profile and debug this? Thanks, Rasmus
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65
Mar ’25
ProjectiveTransformCameraComponent with custom matrix
I'm looking to create an effect on iOS that tracks the user's face position with ARKit and shifts nearer/more prominent geometry in the scene around while more "distant" geometry stays fixed to the XY plane - making it look like the geometry on screen "sticks out" I've managed to implement most of this successfully, but it's not perfect when using PerspectiveCameraComponent in RealityKit because as I shift the camera (and change its field of view based on the user's distance) the backplane changes its orientation (it's always orthogonal to camera's direction). I've tried adopting ProjectiveTransformCameraComponent instead. The idea is that the camera shifts around the scene, mirroring the user's head's position, looking at (0,0,0) and the back plane is adjusted to be parallel with the X,Y plane (animation replicated in Blender below). However, I can't manage to set up ProjectiveTransformCameraComponent with an appropriate matrix or update its transform property in a RealityKit System correctly. I also tried setting many simpler projection matrices as described in a number of guides on camera projection matrices on the internet and all I get is a blank view. Does anyone have some guidance on what the projection matrix that ProjectiveTransformCameraComponent expects is meant to look like or how I would go about accomplishing my goal?
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111
Jun ’25
Snap to Item with Assistive Touch does not work when building an Game from Unity.
Hi all, I have been trying to get Apple's assistive touch's snap to item to work for a unity game built using Apple's Core & Accessibility API. The switch control recognises these buttons however, eye tracking will not snap to them. The case in which it needs to snap is when an external eye tracking device is connected and utilises assistive touch & assistive touch's snap to item. All buttons in the game have a AccessibilityNode with the trait 'Button' on them & an appropriate label, which, following the documentation and comments on the developer forum, should allow them to be recognised by snap to item. This is not the case, devices (iPads and iPhones) do not recognise the buttons as a snap to target. Does anyone know why this is the case, and if this is a bug?
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563
Dec ’24
Disable IBL in IOS QUICKLOOK
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arkit_in_ios/specifying_a_lighting_environment_in_ar_quick_look How can I disable it? or at least use a custom texture that's just black? I don't see the purpose of having the real-time environment probe that captures IBL, but always add this fake studio IBL that you can't remove...
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329
Dec ’24
Animations for streaming
We have a macOS app (not yet released, but in use by ourselves), that provides scoreboards for streaming sport events. Today it is expected, that there are nice animations for goals, etc. We are streaming using NDI, which requires a CVPixelBuffer for each frame. We currently create these animations using CABasicAnimation, CAAnimation and CAKeyframeAnimation. In addition we use ScreenCaptureKit to generate the frames. This works fine with 25/30 fps, as long as the window where our animations are performed in is visible. But this is not what it should be. We have a smaller window as main app window and control display performing the animations in reduced size, while the streaming animations need to be in HD format and later maybe in 4K. When using an offscreen window, the animations are not calculated. We get 1 frame per second or so. So we actually have to connect an external display to the MacBook and open the large windows there. Ugly solution. Do we use a completely wrong approach? Or is there a way to tell the macOS to perform the animations although it is an offscreen window? If it cannot work that way, what is an alternative?
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112
May ’25