CoronaCards — iOS

CoronaView

The CoronaView class is a subclass of the UIView/GLKView class. If you're using the Xcode Storyboard / Interface Builder, you need to override UIView with CoronaView. This allows you to create a full-screen CoronaCards app within a Single View Application project.

CoronaViewController

The CoronaViewController is a subclass of the UIViewController/GLKViewController class. If you're building a multi-view app, you can programmatically make the CoronaView a child view. Typically, you instantiate a CoronaViewController when it's not the root controller, for example when the CoronaViewController is a child of another controller.

When creating a CoronaViewController as a child controller, you must override the viewDidLoad method of the parent controller via the following steps:

1. Instantiate the CoronaViewController and ensure that it exists for the lifetime of the CoronaView. In the example below, coronaController is a property of the parent controller that implicitly retains upon assignment.

2. Add the CoronaViewController as a child controller of the parent. This ensures that notifications from the parent controller are propagated to the CoronaViewController, for example when the parent view appears or disappears.

3. Size the CoronaView. When this view is loaded programmatically, it defaults to the size of the screen.

4. Add the CoronaView as a child view of the parent controller's view.

5. Tell CoronaView which main.lua file to run. In the example below, we run the main.lua that is present at the root of the .app bundle. However, you can choose an arbitrary main.lua file by calling runWithPath:parameters: instead.

// This method belongs to the parent UIViewController
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

    self.coronaController = [[[CoronaViewController alloc] init] autorelease];  // (Step 1)
    [self addChildViewController:self.coronaController];  // (Step 2)

    CoronaView *coronaView = (CoronaView *)self.coronaController.view;

    // Same size as parent view
    coronaView.frame = self.view.frame;  // (Step 3)

    [self.view addSubview:coronaView];  // (Step 4)

    [coronaView run];  // (Step 5)
}

Transparent Overlays

In iOS, a CoronaView can have a transparent background. To accomplish this, two things are required:

1. Instruct iOS to enable transparency in the UIView itself:

// [Obj-C]
coronaView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
coronaView.opaque = NO;

2. Tell Corona to utilize an transparent OpenGL surface by setting the alpha key to 0:

-- [Lua]
display.setDefault( "background", 0, 0, 0, 0 )