Hi there!
I am using SpriteKit for most of my game development, and while I am usually able to achieve what I need using the framework, I find my self a bit stuck with the usage of SKEmitterNode.
I am developing a pixel-art style game, which among others drills down to the fact that whatever is rendered to the scene, should not be anti-aliased. This because that will remove the pixelated effect.
For textures, one can use the filteringMode property and set it to .nearest to achieve this.
However, with an SKEmitterNode, setting this property of the emitted particles using particleTexture has no effect. As a result, all emitted particles are antialiased, which breaks the pixel art look of the game.
Looking at the documentation, I guess particles are rendered in a different way compared to normal SKSpriteNode, hence this property has no effect.
Specifically this sentence A particle’s texture is always stretched uniformly. draws me to that conclusion.
I have been trying to workaround this, but I find no working solution to the problem. Rolling my own emitter system will be a daunting task, that I prefer not to engage into.
I hope someone here might have a suggestion how to work around this. If not, I would be interested to learn how I could request this as a feature to Apple (as I dont think this is necessarily a bug).
Hope you can help, Sander