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CMake unable to generate the Xcode file described in this tutorial
In the Creating A 3D Application With Hydra Rendering tutorial on the Apple Developer website, on the last step where I execute this command: cmake -S ~/Users/macuser/CreatingA3DApplicationWithHydraRendering/ -B ~/Users/macuser/CreatingA3DApplicationWithHydraRendering/ I keep getting an error: CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:5 (include): include could not find requested file: /Users/macuser/USDInstall/bin/pxrConfig.cmake I've tried to follow the instructions as mentioned in the README.md file included in the project files at least 5 times as well as moving the pxrConfig.cmake file around and copying it in different folders, then executed the command and was still unsuccessful into generating the proper file expected to compile and render the HydraPlayer renderer. How do I get cmake to generate the Xcode file to create the HydraPlayer renderer?
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156
May ’25
In Metal compute kernels, when do thread variables get spilled into the device memory?
How many 32-bit variables can I use concurrently in a single thread of a Metal compute kernel without worrying about the variables getting spilled into the device memory? Alternatively: how many 32-bit registers does a single thread have available for itself? Let's say that each thread of my compute kernel needs to store and work with its own array of N float variables, where N can be 128, 256, 512 or more. To achieve maximum possible performance, I do not want to the local thread variables to get spilled into the slow device memory. I want all N variables to be stored "on-chip", in the thread memory space. To make my question more concrete, let's say there is an array thread float localArray[N]. Assuming an unrealistic hypothetical scenario where localArray is the only variable in the whole kernel, what is the maximum value of N for which no portion of localArray would get spilled into the device memory? I searched in the Metal feature set tables, but I could not find any details.
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606
Mar ’25
USDZ File Crashes in QuickLook on iPad 9th Gen (iPadOS 18.3) – Urgent Help Needed
Hi everyone, I’m experiencing a critical issue with USDZ files created in Reality Composer on an iPad 9th Generation (iPadOS 18.3). The files work perfectly on iPads from the 10th Generation onwards and on iPad Pros. However, on older devices like the iPad 9th Generation and older iPhones, QuickLook (file preview) crashes when opening them. This is a major issue because these USDZ files are part of an exhibition where artworks are extended with AR elements via a web page. If some visitors cannot view the 3D content, it significantly impacts the experience. What’s puzzling is that two years ago, we exported USDZ files from Reality Composer, made them available via a website, and they worked flawlessly on all devices, including older iPads and iPhones. Now, with the latest iPadOS, they consistently crash on older devices. Has anyone encountered a similar issue? Are there known limitations with QuickLook on older devices, or is there a way to optimize the USDZ files to prevent crashes? Could this be related to changes in iPadOS or RealityKit? Any advice or workaround would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
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601
Feb ’25
Why is depth/stencil buffer loaded/stored twice in xcode gpu capture?
I used xcode gpu capture to profile render pipeline's bandwidth of my game.Then i found depth buffer and stencil buffer use the same buffer whitch it's format is Depth32Float_Stencil8. But why in a single pass of pipeline, this buffer was loaded twice, and the Load Attachment Size of Encoder Statistics was double. Is there any bug with xcode gpu capture?Or the pass really loaded the buffer twice times?
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362
Mar ’25
RealityKit VideoMaterial renders pink on iOS 18
our app is live, and it appears that since the ios 18 update - the VideoMaterial renders pink / purple color instead of the video (picture attached). the audio is rendered properly. we found that it occurs on old devices: iPhone 11 & iPhone SE 2020. I've found this thread of Andy Jazz on stackoverflow: Steps to Reproduce: Create a plane for the video screen. Apply a VideoMaterial using AVPlayerItem. Anchor the model entity to an ARImageAnchor. Expected Outcome: The video should play as a material on the plane in RealityKit. Actual Outcome: On iOS 18, the plane appears pink, indicating the VideoMaterial isn’t applied. What I’ve Tried: -Verified the video URL is correct. -Checked that the AVPlayerItem and VideoMaterial are initialised correctly. -Ensured the AVPlayer is playing the video. I also tried different formats (mov / mp4 / m4v), and verifying that the video's status is readyToPlay. any suggestions?
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206
Jun ’25
GameKit Configuration File - Apple Documentation out of Date
This is the first time I have tried adding achievements to my games. The online documentation says: "Before you can access achievements in your code, you can configure them in Xcode and sync the configuration updates you make with App Store Connect. Begin configuring achievements by creating a GameKit configuration file. In Xcode, choose File > New > File from Template. Select GameKit File, and click Next. In the sheet that appears, enter a name for the configuration and click Create." Sounds easy - except Xcode 16.2 does not have a GameKit File as one of the Templates. Please advise on how to proceed and it would be nice if the documentation were updated.
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129
May ’25
How to implement c for vision ?
I want to use reality to create a custom material that can use my own shader and support Mesh instancing (for rendering 3D Gaussian splating), but I found that CustomMaterial does not support VisionOS. Is there any other interface that can achieve my needs? Where can I find examples?
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85
Jul ’25
Game Center breaks "Kids games" Rules on iPadOS 26
I have several games on the app store which are setup as "For Kids" which means these games cannot have any way to access the outside world including the App Store. No problem. These games have worked fine for years until iOS 26. Now, all my updates are being rejected because the new version of Game Center running on iPadOS 26 has a way for people to exit the game and go to the App Store. I have no control over this since it's built into Game Center, and the app review folks want me to put a "parental gate" on it, but there's no way to do that because... well... it's in Game Center, not my code. So, I'm unable to update my apps because of this. Presumably, the existing versions on the app store still do this exact same thing, so my update isn't going to make any difference. Does anyone know of a way to make that crap at the top go away so this isn't an issue?
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383
Sep ’25
Spatial Scene API for iOS Apps
As part of the WWDC25 Keynote, a technology was announced that can present 2D images as 3D spatial scenes. This announcement is supported by a Press Release. ...developers can use the Spatial Scene API to make their app experience even more immersive. Zillow is taking advantage of the API for their Zillow Immersive app, allowing users to see images of homes and apartments with the rich depth and dimension that spatial scenes offer. The feature also appears in the Photos App on iOS 26 Developer Beta 1. Tapping "Spatial Scene" on any photo opens a view of that photo with a parallax effect. I've searched the WWDC sessions and new documentation and have come up short. Reaching out here for help. Is there any documentation for Spatial Scene API? Or any guidance on how to implement the spatial scene in iOS?
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311
Jun ’25
Distortion Artifacts on VisionOS When Rendering Opaque/Alpha Clipped Foliage in URP (Unity 6.0, Metal)
I'm running into a persistent visual issue while deploying a floral corridor scene to Apple Vision Pro using Unity 6.0 with URP and Metal. The issue only appears on the Vision Pro device — everything looks fine in the Unity Editor. Issue Description When the frame rate drops to around 60–70 FPS, noticeable distortion artifacts appear around the edges of foliage models. It seems like the background meshes (behind the plants) get warped and leak through the edges of the foliage. Although this is most visible around the leaves, even solid objects like standard URP wall or box models show distorted edges when the issue occurs. All the foliage uses Opaque or Alpha Clipping materials. Things I've Tried Changing the foliage materials to Transparent mode —distortion around edges disappears, but using Transparent for a large number of foliage assets is not ideal for performance or sorting complexity. Reducing the number of foliage objects — with only a few plants in the scene and the frame rate staying around 100 FPS, the distortion disappears. However, this isn’t a practical solution for a full environment. Possible Cause? I came across this note in the Unity documentation: "Ensure depth-buffer for each pixel is non-zero - on visionOS, the depth buffer is used for reprojection. To ensure visual effects like skyboxes and shaders are displayed beautifully, ensure that some value is written to the depth for each pixel." Could this be related to the issue? Is it possible that Alpha Clipping with low pixel coverage leads to some pixels not writing to the depth buffer, which then causes problems during Vision Pro’s reprojection or foveated rendering? However, even when I disable Alpha Clipping entirely, the distortion issue still persists, so it may not be solely caused by clipping itself. Project Setup Unity 6.0 (URP) Depth Texture: Enable Using Metal as the graphics backend Running on real Vision Pro hardware (not simulator) Any advice on how to avoid these distortion issues on Vision Pro would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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127
Jul ’25
Building Game Porting Toolkit on Sequoia
Like many folks here, I've recently attempted to build Apple's Game Porting Toolkit on my machine and ran into compiler errors, but instead of going the usual route of downloading the prebuilt package (kindly provided by GCenX), I decided to see if I could force it to build (since it was obviously buildable at some point). Down below is the list of things I had to do to make it work. Disclaimer: There are several dirty hacks I had to attempt to force the system to do what I needed. Use at your own risk. Don't forget to run all brew commands from a Rosetta prompt: arch -x86_64 zsh Install openssl This one is easy. Just run brew tap rbenv/tap brew install rbenv/tap/openssl@1.1 Install Command Line Tools 15.1 This specific version is required since newer versions come with the linker that is not compatible with the custom compiler (game-porting-toolkit-compiler) that GPTK is using. However, by default 15.1 tools won't install on Sequoia since the installer complains that macOS version is too new. Obviously, Apple has their reasons to not allow this, but all we need is a compiler which should be mostly indifferent to the OS version. To trick the installer, we need to change OS requirement of the installer package. You can do it in four easy steps: Copy Command Line Tools.pkg from the mounted Command_Line_Tools_for_Xcode_15.1.dmg to some other directory. Expand the installer package: pkgutil --expand "Command Line Tools.pkg" CLT You might be prompted to install Command Line Tools when you call pkgutil, just install any version. Go to the newly created CLT folder and edit the Distribution file (it may appear as executable but it's just an xml). You would want to change allowed-os-versions to something greater than 15. Removing this section altogether might also work. When done, re-wrap the package: pkgutil --flatten CLT "Command Line Tools 2.pkg" Congratulations, now you should be able to install 15.1 tools on your OS! If you had to install newer Command Line Tools for pkgutil, delete them before installing 15.1: sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools Next step is to make Homebrew accept the outdated 15.1 tools, as by default it'll complain that they're outdated or corrupted. To shut it up, open /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/extend/os/Mac/diagnostic.rb and remove references to check_if_supported_sdk_available from a couple of fatal build check collections. Note - by default, Homebrew will auto-update on any invocation, which will overwrite any changes you've made to its internals. To disable this behavior, before running any brew commands in the terminal, run export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 After these manipulations, Homebrew might still complain about outdated Command Line Tools, but it won't be a fatal error anymore. Finally, we need to downgrade MinGW to 11.0.1, since the latest version spits out compiler errors when compiling Wine. Unfortunately, Homebrew does a bad job tracking versions of MinGW, so there is no automatic way to do it. Instead, you have to manually download and install old MinGW 11.0.1 formula from the Homebrew git repository. I used the commit from Sep 16, 2023: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/b95f4f9491394af667943bd92b081046ba3406f2/Formula/m/mingw-w64.rb Download the file above, save it in your current working directory, and then run brew install ./mingw-w64.rb If you had a newer version of MinGW already installed from the previous build attempts, you can unlink it before installing the one above: brew unlink mingw-w64 With Command Line Tools 15.1 and MinGW 11.0.1 you should now be able to build GPTK without errors: brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit In the end, steps above worked for me, although more things could break in the future. I'm leaving the instructions here just to show that it's still possible to build GPTK manually instead of relying on third parties, but with all the hoops I had to jump through I can't really recommend it.
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720
Mar ’25
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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377
Oct ’25
10-bit support in iPad Pro
Hi, I’m using the latest iPad Pro (13-inch) and I can see that Metal offers an rgb10a2unorm texture for rendering, but when I render a grey ramp and measure the actual luminance, I get a pattern that I would expect from an 8-bit texture (see below). Before I start ripping apart all my code, is there anything else I need to do to convince iOS to render my texture in 10-bit? I already tried setting the PixelFormat in my CMetalLayer to rgb10a2unorm, but that didn’t change anything.
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411
Sep ’25
CGContextAddArc not respecting clipping rects for open paths
macOS 15.2, MBP M1, built-in display. The following code produces a line outside the bounds of my clipping region when drawing to CGLayers, to produce a clockwise arc: CGContextBeginPath(m_s.outContext); CGContextAddArc(m_s.outContext, leftX + radius, topY - radius, radius, -startRads, -endRads, 1); CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(m_s.outContext, col.fRed(), col.fGreen(), col.fBlue(), col.fAlpha()); CGContextSetLineWidth(m_s.outContext, width); CGContextStrokePath(m_s.outContext); Drawing other shapes such as rects or ellipses doesn't cause a problem. I can work around the issue by bringing the path back to the start of the arc: CGContextBeginPath(m_s.outContext); CGContextAddArc(m_s.outContext, leftX + radius, topY - radius, radius, -startRads, -endRads, 1); // add a second arc back to the start CGContextAddArc(m_s.outContext, leftX + radius, topY - radius, radius, -endRads, -startRads, 0); CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(m_s.outContext, col.fRed(), col.fGreen(), col.fBlue(), col.fAlpha()); CGContextSetLineWidth(m_s.outContext, width); CGContextStrokePath(m_s.outContext); But this does appear to be a bug.
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532
Jan ’25
Converting JPG to JP2 using ImageMagicK library on iOS
I am trying to convert a JPG image to a JP2 (JPEG 2000) format using the ImageMagick library on iOS. However, although the file extension is changing to .jp2, the format of the image does not seem to be changing. The output image is still being treated as a JPG file, and not as a true JP2 format. Here is the code (IBAction)convertButtonClicked:(id)sender { NSString *jpgPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Example" ofType:@"jpg"]; NSString *tempFilePath = [NSTemporaryDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Converted.jp2"]; MagickWand *wand = NewMagickWand(); if (MagickReadImage(wand, [jpgPath UTF8String]) == MagickFalse) { char *description; ExceptionType severity; description = MagickGetException(wand, &severity); NSLog(@"Error reading image: %s", description); MagickRelinquishMemory(description); return; } if (MagickSetFormat(wand, "JP2") == MagickFalse) { char *description; ExceptionType severity; description = MagickGetException(wand, &severity); NSLog(@"Error setting image format to JP2: %s", description); MagickRelinquishMemory(description); } if (MagickWriteImage(wand, [tempFilePath UTF8String]) == MagickFalse) { NSLog(@"Error writing JP2 image"); return; } NSLog(@"Image successfully converted."); } @end
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447
Jan ’25
Why Large-Scale Model Scenes Cause Real Device Crashes
Is there any limitation in Vision Pro when loading scenes with large-scale models? ​Test Case: Asset: Composite USDA file containing ​10 individual models​ (total triangles count: ~4.2M) Simulator: Loads and renders correctly Real Device: Loads asset successfully but ​ failure during rendering phase: Environment abruptly dims System spontaneously reboots How can we resolve this issue? Below are excerpted logs preceding the crash: <<<< FigAudioSession(AV) >>>> audioSessionAVAudioSession_CopyMXSessionProperty signalled err=-19224 (kFigAudioSessionError_UnsupportedOperation) (getMXSessionProperty unsupported) at FigAudioSession_AVAudioSession.m:606 Attempted to add ornament: <MRUIPlatterOrnament: 0x10a658f00; _isInternal: YES; _displaceWindowChrome: NO; _canCaptureUI: NO; _isBeingRemoved: NO; contentAnchorPoint3D: "{0.5, 0.5, 0}"; position: <MRUIPlatterOrnamentRelativePosition: 0x105b68e70; anchorPoint: {0.5, 0.5, 1}>; rotation: "{{0, 0, 0}, 0}"; opacity: 1.000000; canFollowUser: YES; effectiveOffset: "{0, 0, 0}"; presentingViewController: 0x0; billboardingBehavior: 0x0; scalingBehavior: 0x0; relativeToParent: NO; nonHeritableDepthDisplacement: 0.000000; order: 0.000000; _window._determinedSize: {0, 0}; _window: (null)> to nil or non-supporting UIScene: <UIWindowScene: 0x10a8a0000; role: UISceneSessionRoleImmersiveSpaceApplication; persistentIdentifier: test.test:SFBSystemService-BA3A21A3-D1AB-42E2-8AF0-AE0AB83BE528; activationState: UISceneActivationStateUnattached>. No action taken. Failed to set dependencies on asset 2823930584475958382 because NetworkAssetManager does not have an asset entity for that id. apply fence tx failed (client=0x98490e18) [0x10000003 (ipc/send) invalid destination port] Failed to commit transaction (client=0xa86516e2) [0x10000003 (ipc/send) invalid destination port]
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215
Jul ’25
Can't remove annotations from PdfView
Hi everyone, I faced an issue that on IOS 26 removeAnnotation method doesn't remove annotation. This code worked on previous versions (IOS 18, 17) but suddenly stopped working on IOS 26. Has anyone faced this issue? guard let document = await pdfView.document else { return } for pageIndex in 0..<document.pageCount { guard let page = document.page(at: pageIndex) else { continue } let annotations = page.annotations for annotation in annotations { page.removeAnnotation(annotation) } }
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210
Oct ’25