EricBall's Tech Projects - Swift 3 catch 22

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Last night I told myself to stop playing Minecraft and get back to work on my iOS game. At least start to put together the level editor. Once I have something partially working I'm much more likely to spend time working on it.

But XCode had other ideas as it had updated. So when I opened the project, it asked me (twice) whether I wanted to convert it to the current version of Swift. I said no, but then it said it wouldn't be able to compile it. That wasn't a good option either. So I made a backup of the project and told it to convert it to Swift 3.

For the most part the change from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3 is cosmetic - more consistent method naming (like fixing stdio.h so fputs parameters are stream then string order). But I found one Catch-22.

In my game I'm using an OpenGL fragment (pixel) shader. To pass a variable from the main program to the shader it's put in a "uniform" - a special kind of variable. Uniforms have special types to match OpenGL types, vectors in particular. The commands to create these these vector uniforms is different in Swift 3. That wouldn't be a problem except the commands aren't supported by iOS 9 for some reason. So while I'd like to use Swift 3 in case I need to make code changes in the future, I also want to support iOS 9.

So for the moment I've gone with Swift 2.3, which XCode will compile.

And I still haven't started coding the level editor.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/7/entry-13322-swift-3-catch-22/