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SCNGeometry and .copy()
Up to now I have created multiple new SCNNodes using an instance of SCNGeometry and it was OK that they all had the same appearance. Now I want variety and when I make a copy of that instance using: let newGeo = myGeoInstance.copy() as! SCNGeometry (must be force cast because copy() -> any?) all elements are verified present. :-) Likewise: node.geometry?.replaceMaterial(at: index, with: myNewMaterial) is verified to correctly change the material(s) at the correct index(s). The only problem is the modified "teapot" is not visible, and yes I have set node.isHidden = false. Has anyone experienced this? In the old days reversing the verts was a solution. In desperation I tried that. |-(
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828
Dec ’24
authenticateHandler events not being received on iOS 18
I work on a team that provides an SDK for another game to handle various tasks like authentication. They are experiencing a case where devices using iOS 17 are failing to authenticate with GameCenter, receiving the message "The requested operation could not be completed because local player has not been authenticated." We imagine this is because they still have some setup to finish regarding GameCenter itself, and we're working with them to take care of that. However, on iOS 18, their app ends up waiting indefinitely for GameCenter authentication messages that it never receives. That's where we're puzzled. We expect them to have the same outcome regardless of OS version. We initiate GameCenter authentication by setting an authenticateHandler after some initial application setup. The handler has code to account for UI, errors, and successful authentication. On iOS 17, it's clear that it's getting called as expected because they receive an indication that the player isn't authenticated. But on iOS 18, it looks like the same handler code on iOS 18 isn't being called at all. Are there differences in how iOS 18 interacts with the authenticationHandler that we somehow aren't accounting for? Or is there potentially something else that we're doing incorrectly that is manifesting only on iOS 18? Here's a simplified version of our login function code (in Obj-C++). There is no OS-specific code, and the job that owns this function does stay in scope until after authentication is complete. void beginLogin() { // Snip: Check if the user is already logged in. // Snip: Prevent multiple concurrent calls to this function. auto authenticateHandler = ^(UIViewController* gcViewController, NSError* error) { if (gcViewController != nil) { // Snip: Display the UI } else if (error != nil) { // Snip: Handle the error. } else { if ([[GKLocalPlayer localPlayer] isAuthenticated]) { // Snip: Handle successful authentication. } else { // Snip: Handle other case. } } }; [[GKLocalPlayer localPlayer] setAuthenticateHandler: authenticateHandler]; }
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153
May ’25
Disable IBL in IOS QUICKLOOK
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arkit_in_ios/specifying_a_lighting_environment_in_ar_quick_look How can I disable it? or at least use a custom texture that's just black? I don't see the purpose of having the real-time environment probe that captures IBL, but always add this fake studio IBL that you can't remove...
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353
Dec ’24
How to get GKMatch instance after accepting GKInvite?
In my SceneKit game I'm able to connect two players with GKMatchmakerViewController. Now I want to support the scenario where one of them disconnects and wants to reconnect. I tried to do this with this code: nonisolated public func match(_ match: GKMatch, player: GKPlayer, didChange state: GKPlayerConnectionState) { Task { @MainActor in switch state { case .connected: break case .disconnected, .unknown: let matchRequest = GKMatchRequest() matchRequest.recipients = [player] do { try await GKMatchmaker.shared().addPlayers(to: match, matchRequest: matchRequest) } catch { } @unknown default: break } } } nonisolated public func player(_ player: GKPlayer, didAccept invite: GKInvite) { guard let viewController = GKMatchmakerViewController(invite: invite) else { return } viewController.matchmakerDelegate = self present(viewController) } But after presenting the view controller with GKMatchmakerViewController(invite:), nothing else happens. I would expect matchmakerViewController(_:didFind:) to be called, or how would I get an instance of GKMatch? Here is the code I use to reproduce the issue, and below the reproduction steps. Code Run the attached project on an iPad and a Mac simultaneously. On both devices, tap the ship to connect to GameCenter. Create an automatched match by tapping the rightmost icon on both devices. When the two devices are matched, on iPad close the dialog and tap on the ship to disconnect from GameCenter. Wait some time until the Mac detects the disconnect and automatically sends an invitation to join again. When the notification arrives on the iPad, tap it, then tap the ship to connect to GameCenter again. The iPad receives the call player(_:didAccept:), but nothing else, so there’s no way to get a GKMatch instance again.
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752
Apr ’25
Desire to close contour from left & right two top points
Hello all... is there a way to close a contour if you have found say two points on each side top "extension"? see image attached. So in end desire a trapezoid type shape. Code example would be very appreciated. thank you :) Think I have it as a CGPath. So a way to edit a CGPath, or close the top from a top left to a top right point?
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498
Jan ’25
Metal recommendedMaxWorkingSetSize vs actual RAM on iPhone (LLM load fails)
Context I’m deploying large language models on iPhone using llama.cpp. A new iPhone Air (12 GB RAM) reports a Metal MTLDevice.recommendedMaxWorkingSetSize of 8,192 MB, and my attempt to load Llama-2-13B Q4_K (~7.32 GB weights) fails during model initialization. Environment Device: iPhone Air (12 GB RAM) iOS: 26 Xcode: 26.0.1 Build: Metal backend enabled llama.cpp App runs on device (not Simulator) What I’m seeing MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice().recommendedMaxWorkingSetSize == 8192 MiB Loading Llama-2-13B Q4_K (7.32 GB) fails to complete. Logs indicate memory pressure / allocation issues consistent with the 8 GB working-set guidance. Smaller models (e.g., 7B/8B with similar quantization) load and run (8B Q4_K provide around 9 tokens/second decoding speed). Questions Is 8,192 MB an expected recommendedMaxWorkingSetSize on a 12 GB iPhone? What values should I expect on other 2025 devices including iPhone 17 (8 GB RAM) and iPhone 17 Pro (12 GB RAM) Is it strictly enforced by Metal allocations (heaps/buffers), or advisory for best performance/eviction behavior? Can a process practically exceed this for long-lived buffers without immediate Jetsam risk? Any guidance for LLM scenarios near the limit?
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408
Oct ’25
Why is SKPhysicsBody not picking up alpha?! SpriteKit for a WatchOS game.
So I'm trying to use SpriteKit to make the background of my game. The walls have alpha 1.0, and the safe area alpha 0 and fully transparent. (e.g. a big black square with a smaller transparent square in the middle of it). Yet sprite kit always assume the entire image is either fully opaque or fully transparent. That defies its purpose isn't it? Is there a way to make this work?
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Jan ’25
MPSMatrixRandom SEGFAULTs when ran in an async context
The following minimal snippet SEGFAULTS with SDK 26.0 and 26.1. Won't crash if I remove async from the enclosing function signature - but it's impractical in a real project. import Metal import MetalPerformanceShaders let SEED = UInt64(0x0) typealias T = Float16 /* Why ran in async context? Because global GPU object, and async makeMTLFunction, and async makeMTLComputePipelineState. Nevertheless, can trigger the bug without using global @MainActor let myGPU = MyGPU() */ @main struct CMDLine { static func main() async { let ptr = UnsafeMutablePointer<T>.allocate(capacity: 0) async let future: Void = randomFillOnGPU(ptr, count: 0) print("Main thread is playing around") await future print("Successfully reached the end.") } static func randomFillOnGPU(_ buf: UnsafeMutablePointer<T>, count destbufcount: Int) async { // let (device, queue) = await (myGPU.device, myGPU.commandqueue) let myGPU = MyGPU() let (device, queue) = (myGPU.device, myGPU.commandqueue) // Init MTLBuffer, async let makeFunction, makeComputePipelineState, etc. let tempDataType = MPSDataType.uInt32 let randfiller = MPSMatrixRandomMTGP32(device: device, destinationDataType: tempDataType, seed: Int(bitPattern:UInt(SEED))) print("randomFillOnGPU: successfully created MPSMatrixRandom.") // try await computePipelineState // ^ Crashes before this could return // Or in this minimal case, after randomFillOnGPU() returns // make encoder, set pso, dispatch, commit... } } actor MyGPU { let device : MTLDevice let commandqueue : MTLCommandQueue init() { guard let dev: MTLDevice = MPSGetPreferredDevice(.skipRemovable), let cq = dev.makeCommandQueue(), dev.supportsFamily(.apple6) || dev.supportsFamily(.mac2) else { print("Unable to get Metal Device! Exiting"); exit(EX_UNAVAILABLE) } print("Selected device: \(String(format: "%llX", dev.registryID))") self.device = dev self.commandqueue = cq print("myGPU: initialization complete.") } } See FB20916929. Apparently objc autorelease pool is releasing the wrong address during context switch (across suspension points). I wonder why such obvious case has not been caught before.
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75
Nov ’25
Game Porting Toolkit: Any .exe exits immediately with no output
Hi Apple & devs, I'm trying to test various Windows .exe files using the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK), but I’m hitting a wall: no matter what .exe I try, the command returns instantly with no output — no error, no logs, nothing. Here's what I'm doing: I'm using macOS Sequioa 15.5 on M1 macbook pro. I installed gameportingtoolkt GPTK 2.1 through brew from gcenx: brew install gcenx/wine/game-porting-toolkit When I run any .exe using GPTK's wine64, like this, e.g. with steam user@JMacBook-Pro / % WINEPREFIX=~/wine_prefix /usr/local/bin/gameportingtoolkit 'C:\SteamSetup.exe' --verbose user@JMacBook-Pro / % Immediate exit without any return code, output, nor errors. No output, no crash, no logs. Same result with simple test apps Running with WINEDEBUG=+all (still no output) Even running wine64 does the same thing. I’ve tried: Removing and reinstalling GPTK Creating a fresh WINEPREFIX Checking /tmp and ~/Library/Logs for logs — nothing Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea how to debug it? Is there ANY Apple support for this?? Thanks in advance.
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178
Jun ’25
screencapturekit
I have code that captures a window and displays a cropped image. The problem is 2 fold. Kit doesn't seem to allow to modify stop and recapture image in window mode to capture a portion of the screen. So this makes me having to crop and display the cropped image via a published variable. This all works find. But seems to stop after some time. Using an M1 16gig ram. program is taking less than 100meg of mem with 40-70%cpu as the crow flies. printing captured success in debug mode and sometimes frame isn't valid so guarding against it. any ideas on how to improve my strategy?
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125
Jun ’25
Concurrent conflicting texture writes
Hello! I need to "draw" a set of particles into the texture. It would be trivial in render encoder of course. However, I would like to implement the task in compute kernel. Every particle draw operation is expected to set 5 texels - "center" one and left/right/upper/lower. Particles can and will overlap, so concurrent draws are to be expected. I tried using texture atomics - atomic_store() to be more precise. This worked, albeit pretty slowly - too slow for my purpose. Just to test what would happen, I tried using normal texture write(). I was expecting to see some kind of visual artefacts, but to my surprise, it worked very well (and much faster). My question: is it safe? I understand that calling write() doesn't guarantee any ordering of the operations, so if multiple threads write to the same texel, the final value may come from any of those threads. But suppose all the threads were to write the very same color? Can I assume that the texel in question will have said color after the compute kernel finishes? I am using M2 Pro MacBook, but ideally I would love to get the answer for the all Apple Silicon devices. My texture format is R32Int (so as to be able to use atomics), but I could do with any single-channel format, the purpose of the texture is to be binary mask of sorts. Thanks!
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411
Feb ’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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525
Jan ’25
iOS Simulator can only render 1 RealityView
I'm using RealityView in my iOS game mxied with SwiftUI. For the following 2 example usages, the simulator will only render the first RealityView, and the second one is either super laggy or show a black model. Running on the real device is all good, just simualtor has this issue. Have a TabView and each tab has a RealityView. Have a root view and detail view connected via a push navigation, both root and detail have a RealityView. In the Simulator, the second RealityView is going to be very choppy and basically unusable, but on a real iPhone everything looks great. Is this a known simulator issue or I did something bad?
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121
Jun ’25
Metal HUD Logging issue
Hi I've noticed one issue in Metal HUD, but I'm not sure if it is a bug in the Metal HUD or if there is a purpose for this behavior. Metal HUD has an option to send the data to system log in raw format where the numbers are like metal-HUD: ,,,,,..., https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/monitoring-your-metal-apps-graphics-performance/ If the HUD is displayed, it works just fine, but it seems that when the HUD is hidden (with shift-F9), it still send the data to system log, but the numbers are the same all the time and are not updated while is still being updated. I would expect that it should log the data no matter if the HUD is displayed or not, this of course leads to incorrect FPS calculations Here is an example of the system log entries when the HUD is not visible:
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106
May ’25
How to verify with the appropriate signing authority that Apple signed the public key
Hello I trying to implement authentication via apple services in unity game with server made as another unity app On client side I succesfully got teamPlayerID signature salt timestamp publicKeyUrl According to this documentation https://developer.apple.com/documentation/gamekit/gklocalplayer/fetchitems(foridentityverificationsignature:)?language=objc I have to Verify with the appropriate signing authority that Apple signed the public key. As I said my server is special build of unity project So now I have this kind of C# programm to check apple authority over public certificate i got from publicKeyUrl TextAsset textAsset; byte[] bytes; textAsset = Resources.Load&lt;TextAsset&gt;("AppleRootCA-G3"); bytes = textAsset.bytes; rootCert.ChainPolicy.ExtraStore.Add(new X509Certificate2(bytes)); textAsset = Resources.Load&lt;TextAsset&gt;("AppleRootCA-G2"); bytes = textAsset.bytes; rootCert.ChainPolicy.ExtraStore.Add(new X509Certificate2(bytes)); textAsset = Resources.Load&lt;TextAsset&gt;("AppleIncRootCertificate"); bytes = textAsset.bytes; rootCert.ChainPolicy.ExtraStore.Add(new X509Certificate2(bytes)); rootCert.Build(cert); Where cert is X509Certificate2 object I ge from publicKeyUrl AppleIncRootCertificate AppleRootCA-G2 AppleRootCA-G3 is certificates I got from https://www.apple.com/certificateauthority/ But it is not work Anytime rootCert.Build(cert); return false Why it is not work? May be I build keychain using wrong root CA cert? Or whole approach incorrect? Please help
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113
Jun ’25
Game Center Sandbox: Achievements not unlocking in development build?
Hello Everyone I am new here, I am testing game center integration and using a development build of my IOS game. I have set up a couple of achievements in app store connect, but when I trigger them in the game then they do not unlock or show up. Okay so i am signed into the game center with a sandbox account on a test advice. Is there anything else I need to configure, or do achievements usually only work after the game is released?. I will appreciate any guidance… Thanks in Advance!!!
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138
May ’25
Sparse Texture Writes
Hey, I've been struggling with this for some days now. I am trying to write to a sparse texture in a compute shader. I'm performing the following steps: Set up a sparse heap and create a texture from it Map the whole area of the sparse texture using updateTextureMapping(..) Overwrite every value with the value "4" in a compute shader Blit the texture to a shared buffer Assert that the values in the buffer are "4". I have a minimal example (which is still pretty long unfortunately). It works perfectly when removing the line heapDesc.type = .sparse. What am I missing? I could not find any information that writes to sparse textures are unsupported. Any help would be greatly appreciated. import Metal func sparseTexture64x64Demo() throws { // ── Metal objects guard let device = MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice() else { throw NSError(domain: "SparseNotSupported", code: -1) } let queue = device.makeCommandQueue()! let lib = device.makeDefaultLibrary()! let pipeline = try device.makeComputePipelineState(function: lib.makeFunction(name: "addOne")!) // ── Texture descriptor let width = 64, height = 64 let format: MTLPixelFormat = .r32Uint // 4 B per texel let desc = MTLTextureDescriptor() desc.textureType = .type2D desc.pixelFormat = format desc.width = width desc.height = height desc.storageMode = .private desc.usage = [.shaderWrite, .shaderRead] // ── Sparse heap let bytesPerTile = device.sparseTileSizeInBytes let meta = device.heapTextureSizeAndAlign(descriptor: desc) let heapBytes = ((bytesPerTile + meta.size + bytesPerTile - 1) / bytesPerTile) * bytesPerTile let heapDesc = MTLHeapDescriptor() heapDesc.type = .sparse heapDesc.storageMode = .private heapDesc.size = heapBytes let heap = device.makeHeap(descriptor: heapDesc)! let tex = heap.makeTexture(descriptor: desc)! // ── CPU buffers let bytesPerPixel = MemoryLayout<UInt32>.stride let rowStride = width * bytesPerPixel let totalBytes = rowStride * height let dstBuf = device.makeBuffer(length: totalBytes, options: .storageModeShared)! let cb = queue.makeCommandBuffer()! let fence = device.makeFence()! // 2. Map the sparse tile, then signal the fence let rse = cb.makeResourceStateCommandEncoder()! rse.updateTextureMapping( tex, mode: .map, region: MTLRegionMake2D(0, 0, width, height), mipLevel: 0, slice: 0) rse.update(fence) // ← capture all work so far rse.endEncoding() let ce = cb.makeComputeCommandEncoder()! ce.waitForFence(fence) ce.setComputePipelineState(pipeline) ce.setTexture(tex, index: 0) let threadsPerTG = MTLSize(width: 8, height: 8, depth: 1) let tgCount = MTLSize(width: (width + 7) / 8, height: (height + 7) / 8, depth: 1) ce.dispatchThreadgroups(tgCount, threadsPerThreadgroup: threadsPerTG) ce.updateFence(fence) ce.endEncoding() // Blit texture into shared buffer let blit = cb.makeBlitCommandEncoder()! blit.waitForFence(fence) blit.copy( from: tex, sourceSlice: 0, sourceLevel: 0, sourceOrigin: MTLOrigin(x: 0, y: 0, z: 0), sourceSize: MTLSize(width: width, height: height, depth: 1), to: dstBuf, destinationOffset: 0, destinationBytesPerRow: rowStride, destinationBytesPerImage: totalBytes) blit.endEncoding() cb.commit() cb.waitUntilCompleted() assert(cb.error == nil, "GPU error: \(String(describing: cb.error))") // ── Verify a few texels let out = dstBuf.contents().bindMemory(to: UInt32.self, capacity: width * height) print("first three texels:", out[0], out[1], out[width]) // 0 1 64 assert(out[0] == 4 && out[1] == 4 && out[width] == 4) } Metal shader: #include <metal_stdlib> using namespace metal; kernel void addOne(texture2d<uint, access::write> tex [[texture(0)]], uint2 gid [[thread_position_in_grid]]) { tex.write(4, gid); }
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121
May ’25