How to advance time in an SKEmitterNode using advanceSimulationTime()

Paul Hudson    February 13th 2018    @twostraws

When you create a particle system in SpriteKit, the particles start at their creation point and move outwards from there. That’s fine for things like explosions and fire, but if you’re using the particles to simulate something that has no real start or end – space dust, for example – then having your particles start from a particular location looks wrong.

To fix this, you should use the advanceSimulationTime() method of SKEmitterNode: give it a number of seconds, and it effectively fast forwards the particle system by that amount. For a space dust particle system, this would fill the screen with particles, so the game screen doesn’t start empty.

Here’s some code:

if let starfield = SKEmitterNode(fileNamed: "Starfield") {
    starfield.position = CGPoint(x: 1024, y: 384)
    starfield.advanceSimulationTime(10)
    addChild(starfield)
}

Available from iOS 7.0

Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!

Tweet

Other people are reading…

• How to add a fragment shader to an SKSpriteNode using SKShader
• How to simulate gravity in a SpriteKit scene
• How to generate a random number with GKRandomSource
• How to write text using SKLabelNode
• How to made an SKSpriteNode render faster using blendMode

About the Swift Knowledge Base

This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.