I reached that part where I need the user to type stuff into the game… To my surprise, the first implementation that jumped at me was in CCTextFieldTTF, namely, the TextFieldTTF class.
This class didn’t have the create methods conventions, and felt weird. After implementing the thing, it turns out that the freaking thing is so bad, and barely looks anything remotely like a textfield. I was in shock.
I did a quick search about this, and it seems that the implementation of TextFieldTTF is in pure OpenGL, to be multiplatform as other parts of the code are. That’s when the CCEditBox implementation caught my eye.
I launched the cocos2d-x tests, and navigated to Extensions->EditBox, and there it was. A native, responsive, fully functional textfield that your eyes would love to see. Makes me wonder why not just wipe TextFieldTTF off the face of the planet.
Then, I found the sad truth. Since TextFieldTTF was a native implementation, it had to be implemented separately for each platform, and that is not trivial, especially with all the platforms that cocos2d-x supports.
The current implementations are half decent, but there were missing parts in the Mac implementation, that I went ahead and patched. I think I can actually contribute to this part as I develop my game, since I need it, and it’s behind in the cocos2d-x repo.
Conclusion
ALL HAIL OPEN SOURCE!!