How to find a touch's location in a node using location(in:)

Written by Paul Hudson    @twostraws

It's just one line of code to find where the user touched the screen when you're using SpritKit, and that one line can even be used to calculative relative positions of a touch compared to any node in your game.

To get started, you should implement touchesBegan() in your SpriteKit node or scene. This will get called when the user starts touching the node, regardless of where on the node. To locate the exact position, call location(in:) on any UITouch, passing in the node you want to check, like this:

override func touchesBegan(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent?) {
    if let touch = touches.first {
        let location = touch.location(in: self)
        print(location)
    }
}

Available from iOS 7.0 – see Hacking with Swift tutorial 11

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

Tweet

Other people are reading…

• How to create shapes using SKShapeNode
• How to stop an SKPhysicsBody responding to physics using its dynamic property
• How to warp a sprite using SKWarpGeometryGrid
• How to simulate gravity in a SpriteKit scene
• How to run SKActions in a group

About the Swift Knowledge Base

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