Introduction
For some historical reasons, cocos2d-x has three classes that supposedly can be used to take the user input. TextField, TextFieldTTF, and EditBox. We are trying to find out which one to use, and throw in a few tips on how to use them.
The Champion
Out of the three classes, I find the EditBox to be the best for general use. It restricts you to a single line of text, but in general, has more features than the other classes.
TextField is not so bad, but doesn’t have a bunch of supported features. Please refer to the cocos2d-x tests to see which features have been implemented.
Finally, TextFieldTTF. Just don’t use it. It’s pretty cool that this component is a subclass of the Label class. This means, it’s not a native component, it’s a simple OpenGL rendered label that will update as you enter text through the keyboard. The problem is, it’s way out of date, and works like crap.
Just a Tip
Now, for the tip:
The performance of ui::TextField and ui::EditBox were crappy as hell when I was running on iOS in debug. I searched online for solutions, but it seemed as if I am the only guy facing this problem!
I decided to run performance tests, so I run the profiler, which compiles the app in release mode… The textfields performance is stellar! What?! It seems that in debug mode, a lot of debugging crap happens that causes the performance issues, but not in release mode. So, don’t worry about the performance issues and slow-ness you might encounter when running in debug mode.
Conclusion
Use EditBox if you only need one line of text, TextField otherwise.