SpriteKit fast fullscreen vignette / lighting with alpha blending

Question

I am making a platforming game with SpriteKit. I want to achieve the effect that only the area around the player is lit and everything else fades into darkness. Imagine something like a fake light source or a strong vignette. For testing purpose I created the following code:

let effect = SKEffectNode()
effect.zPosition = 100
effect.position = CGPoint(x: 0, y: 0)
effect.shouldRasterize = false
effect.blendMode = SKBlendMode.Multiply

let gray = SKSpriteNode()
gray.color = SKColor.grayColor()
gray.size = self.frame.size
gray.blendMode = SKBlendMode.Multiply
gray.position = CGPoint(x: 0, y: 0)

let shine = SKSpriteNode(imageNamed: "Shine")
shine.position = CGPoint(x: 0, y: 0)
shine.blendMode = SKBlendMode.Screen
shine.setScale(3.0)

effect.addChild(gray)
effect.addChild(shine)

self.world.addChild(effect)

This works as desired but has a somewhat significant impact on the frame rate. Considering that there might be additional effects like these from eg torches or other light sources on the map, I expect the frame rate to drop even more.

Next, I wanted to make the light flicker, so I assigned a random alpha value to the shine sprite in the update function. This really killed the frame rate, letting it drop instantly to about 4 frames.

I have read about SKEffectNodes and their heavy impact on the frame rate. Is there any other way to achieve this sort of fullscreen alpha blending, that is reasonably fast, even with multiple "lights"?

Any advice is truly appreciated.

Answer 1

Could this be solved with a SKLightNode perhaps?

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/SpriteKit/Reference/SKLightNode_Ref/index.html

Here's an article about how to use the SKLightNode:

http://www.ymc.ch/en/playing-with-ios-8-sprite-kit-and-sklightnode

Hope that's of any usage to you