Cocosnode schedule not scheduling?

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Cocosnode schedule not scheduling?

(6 posts) (3 voices)

Started 2 years ago by iisystems
Latest reply from bradparks

Tags:

cocosnode selector schedule director pause resume UIKit

iisystems
Member

I have a strange problem that I'm hoping someone can give me a hint of where to look as two days of debugging hasn't enlightened me at all. Like most of you, I schedule a selector named step: which is the main animation loop. From time to time, I also pause and resume the director (when the user presses the pause button, etc.) In most cases, everything works fine. However, I have a scenario where I display a UIKit-based screen, resume the director, play the game and then return to the UIKit-based screen (this is a level selection screen). In fact this may not have anything to do with the problem (I'm not sure). All I can say is when I play the game from the main menu (which is a CocosNode layer), all is fine. When I play from the level selection screen, after returning to the level selection screen and selecting another level, none of the animation is scheduled-- my step: loop is not running.

I can clearly see that [[Director sharedDirector] resume] has been called and [self schedule: @selector(step:)] has been called in my game layer. The flow looks the same as normal gameplay, so this is why I mention the UIKit view in between. I've traced into CocosNode.m and see that schedule:selector executes the lines of code it normally does when everything is fine. There are no exceptions being thrown and nothing written to the console.

What could cause cocos2d to ignore the scheduling of a selector?

Thanks in advance,
Scott

Posted 2 years ago #
bradparks
Member

well I'm sure this probably isn't it, but scheduler's get skipped in the node they're scheduled on isn't part of a scene... ie nodeWithSchedule.parent === nil or some parent of it's is nil... and maybe that's true if there not part of a running scene? not sure, but maybe!

Posted 2 years ago #
javy
Member

Some thoughts on scheduling:

Scheduling only works for CocosNode objects. If you added a schedule to any NSObject (e.g., something in the UIKit), it won't be called.

Also, the scheduled object must be added as a child to the scene somewhere. Either the scene itself, a sub-layer, or even sprites/sprite managers.

Hope this helps. Those 2-day-long hair-pulling sessions are horrible!

Posted 2 years ago #
iisystems
Member
Thanks for the replies brad & javy. I was about to post whatever code pertained to your comments whe I stumbled upon the problem. Of course I'm adding the scheduled object as a child-- it's my GameLayer. However, I made my GameLayer a singleton for performance reasons, and it appears when I go through this UIKit layer path that something is not being released so that after initialization of the layer, the last parent scene deallocs AFTER the new parent scene starts running:
```
-(void) dealloc
{
	[self removeChild:levelTransition cleanup:YES];
	levelTransition = nil;
	[self removeChild:[GameLayer node] cleanup:YES];  // Singleton - so GameLayer parent becomes nil after old scene deallocs...
	[super dealloc];
}
```
So brad, you hit this right on and I need to find where my release problem is so this doesn't happen. And Javy helped me realize how accurate your comment was. Thank you both very much!
Posted 2 years ago #

iisystems
Member

So just to close this out, the solution was to replace the Cocos scene before showing my UILayer. The first two lines of code weren't there before and that was causing my GameScene to be retained until a new one was allocated and passed to replaceScene...

// Return to challenge menu
	MenuScene * ms = [MenuScene node];
	[[Director sharedDirector] replaceScene:ms];  // Release running game scene - critical that we release the old GameScene before creating a new one or GameLayer.parent will be cleared
	LevelChallengeViewController *levels = [[LevelChallengeViewController alloc] init];
	[MenuLayer showUIViewController:levels];

Cocosnode schedule not scheduling?

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