iPhone game loop hybrid

I had an idea for an app that would require me to implement these little sprites that would require basic physics features like gravity, acceleration, etc... so naturally I looked into a game loop for the iPhone, there were plenty of threads on this, but what I am trying to understand is that I want to be able to create these sprites and have them behave naturally using a game loop, but still have full "standard" iPhone interaction, i.e. touches, pinching, swiping, core animation, core data, etc...

Is this just as simple as implementi开发者_运维知识库ng a game loop on a background thread and updating sprites on that thread then doing the standard operations on the main UI thread (except of course for obvious background tasks)?

I would like some general overview of this type of thing if thats possible.

I wanted the same thing, but the iPhone SDK is all about async and callbacks and it's better to roll with the framework rather than fight it. If Cocos2d does not satisfy you, you could look into hooking into NSRunLoop.

With regards to CADisplayLink: I noticed a drop in performance (decreased triangle throughput) when using CADisplayLink with OpenGL ES (which you have stated you are not using so I will not elaborate further).

In Xcode try creating a iPhone OpenGL ES project. Just build and run with the default code. You should see a box moving up and down. This simple example should give you an insight into animating objects and how the OS version of the device matters. The OpenGL view is based off a normal view that you can attach gesture watchers to.

Check out one of the available game physics engines. Cocos2D is a good place to start: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ -- free and lots of resouRces to get started with.