The Quest to implement a custom Text Field

To match the UI of the App I'm working on right now, I needed a text field with a custom look and feel that would nicely integrate with cocos2d.

I thought there must've been someone out there who has already accomplished / implemented something like this but after a while of google'ing and browing the cocos2d forums, I figured that there seems to be no final, working source code of something like this available.

With some help from this post by Jack and David (and some other stuff I don't seem to be able to remember), I eventually managed to code something myself which combines the rendering abilities of cocos2d (Sprites and BitmapFontAtlas) with the input capabilities of UITextField. This sure feels like a hack as I'm using an "invisible" (read: very tiny) UITextField to handle the text input while rendering the intercepted text using BitmapFontAtlas and some other Sprites but - hey - it works just fine.

I'll check with the people at cocos2d whether it would be worthwhile to include such a class in the main distribution. In the meantime, the files are available here.

Here's how you'd use the TextField class in your own projects:



Hope this gets you going much quicker than me! Now enjoy the code and let me know what you think!