Centering the camera on a node in swift spritekit

Question

I am creating a Terraria-style game in Swift. I want to have it so the player node is always in the center of the screen, and when you move right the blocks go left like in Terraria.

I am currently trying to figure out how to keep the view centered on the character. Does anyone know of a good way of accomplishing this?

Answer 1

Since iOS 9 / OS X 10.11 / tvOS, SpriteKit includes SKCameraNode, which makes a lot of this easier:

• positioning the camera node automatically adjusts the viewport
• you can easily rotate/zoom the camera by transform in the camera node
• you can fix HUD elements relative to the screen by making them children of the camera node
• the scene's position stays fixed, so things like physics joints don't break the way they do when you emulate a camera by moving the world

It gets even better when you combine camera nodes with another new feature, SKConstraint. You can use a constraint to specify that the camera's position is always centered on a character... or add extra constraints to say, for example, that the camera's position must stay within some margin of the edge of the world.

Answer 2

The below will center the camera on a specific node. It can also smoothly transition to the new position over a set time frame.

class CameraScene : SKScene {
    // Flag indicating whether we've setup the camera system yet.
    var isCreated: Bool = false
    // The root node of your game world. Attach game entities 
    // (player, enemies, &c.) to here.
    var world: SKNode?
    // The root node of our UI. Attach control buttons & state
    // indicators here.
    var overlay: SKNode?
    // The camera. Move this node to change what parts of the world are visible.
    var camera: SKNode?

    override func didMoveToView(view: SKView) {
        if !isCreated {
            isCreated = true

            // Camera setup
            self.anchorPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.5, y: 0.5)
            self.world = SKNode()
            self.world?.name = "world"
            addChild(self.world)
            self.camera = SKNode()
            self.camera?.name = "camera"
            self.world?.addChild(self.camera)

            // UI setup
            self.overlay = SKNode()
            self.overlay?.zPosition = 10
            self.overlay?.name = "overlay"
            addChild(self.overlay)
        }
    }


    override func didSimulatePhysics() {
        if self.camera != nil {
            self.centerOnNode(self.camera!)
        }
    }

    func centerOnNode(node: SKNode) {
        let cameraPositionInScene: CGPoint = node.scene.convertPoint(node.position, fromNode: node.parent)

        node.parent.position = CGPoint(x:node.parent.position.x - cameraPositionInScene.x, y:node.parent.position.y - cameraPositionInScene.y)
    }

}

Change what’s visible in the world by moving the camera:

// Lerp the camera to 100, 50 over the next half-second.
self.camera?.runAction(SKAction.moveTo(CGPointMake(100, 50), duration: 0.5))

Source: swiftalicio - 2D Camera in SpriteKit

For additional information, look at Apple's SpriteKit Programming Guide (Example: Centering the Scene on a Node).