How to make my sprite kit scene appear above a UIView?

Question

I've done some searching but haven't found anything directly addressing my issue: I have an SKScene with several SKNodes each with SKSpriteNode objects for my game, and I am using a background UIImageView (there are some things I need to do with background that cannot be reasonable done with sprite kit - to my knowledge at least); the problem I'm having is that the UIImageView appears above everything and I can't see my game objects.

In my view controller (.m file) I have the following code to call my scene

@implementation GameViewController

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    SKView * skView = (SKView *)self.view;

     SKScene * scene = [GameScene sceneWithSize:skView.bounds.size];
    scene.scaleMode = SKSceneScaleModeAspectFill;
    [skView presentScene:scene];

}

In the GameScene above, I have several SKNodes where all my game objects are children of (for example nodeHDU, nodePlay, nodePauseMenu...), and I am using a UIImageView as my background (I am switching between background scenes over time and am using some nice transitions such as UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionCrossDissolve; couldn't accomplish this with a SKSpriteNode as background without using multiple SKSpriteNodes and an intricate array of SKActions so I"m using UIImageView)

UIView *backgrounds = [[UIView alloc] init];
[self.view insertSubview:backgrounds belowSubview:self.view];

UIImageView *imageBackground = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,0,self.view.frame.size.width,self.view.frame.size.height)];
[backgrounds addSubview:imageBackground];
[backgrounds sendSubviewToBack:imageBackground];
[imageBackground setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"1-A.png"]];
imageBackground.alpha=1.0;

However, the ImageBackground above is the only thing I see when running the app in Xcode. The other objects from my game (children of other nodes) exist, and various NSLog statements are getting called, but they seem to appear behind the ImageBackground I have. The code above "belowSubview" and "sendSubviewToBack" don't help.

So How can I send the imageBackground to actually be the background?

Answer 1

Your problem is here that you are directly setting SKView as a controller view. To overcome from this issue don't make self.view a type of SKView. Do the following step in your storyboard or Xib :

1. Add an UIImageView on the controller's view first. Set the image as well.
2. Then add a SKView over the UIImageViewand set UIClearColor to the background colour.

So the complete hierarchy is like UIViewController->UIView->UIImageView->SKView