Visual Effects and Animations - Learn SpriteBuilder for iOS Game Development - page 424

There may be some use for applying the same effect multiple times, but no mat-
ter how hard I tried, I couldn't find or even imagine a possible use case. This
may change once more effects are added in the future.

If you want to remove an effect, you have to select it in the list by clicking on its name or
an empty area not used by any controls. Once the effect is highlighted, click the [-] button
to remove it.

Caution I found myself frequently hitting Backspace to remove a selected ef-
fect. Alas, this will in fact remove the CCEffectNode and all of its children.
Fortunately, you just need to issue Edit Undo (Cmd+Z) to bring back the Ef-

fect node and its children.

You should publish, build, and run the game. You may see that the effects have a notice-
able, negative effect on the performance, even in the menu. The animations won't look
smooth. Of course, this varies with the device you are testing on. It wouldn't be unheard
of if an iPhone 6 runs these effects at 60 fps while an iPhone 4 struggles to render just 10
frames per second.
Not to mention the iOS Simulator—it uses a software renderer, and emulating shader ef-
fects is particularly slow. Therefore, it's rather common to see a dramatic drop in perform-
ance on the Simulator once one or more effects are visible on the scene.

Available Effects
The currently available effects are roughly divided into three groups:

Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Hue only change the color of individu-
al pixels and can be found in almost any imaging program. All of these ef-
fects use just a single value and should be self-explanatory. But even if you
don't know what the effect does, just add it and move the slider to see what
it does.

Pixellate, Blur, and Bloom alter the look of the rendered content. You've
already seen Pixellate , which basically scales down its content, turning it in-
to pixel art. The Blur effect smooths the content, making it look less sharp.
Bloom is an effect where bright areas bleed into surrounding darker areas,