I have some assets for my game that are being loaded when the gameplay layer is loaded. I’d prefer to load them when the application launches in a loading screen, which is obviously a pretty standard thing to do.
My problem is the way in which new scenes are launched within cocos2D. Consider the following code which occurs (with some variations) in several places throughout the project:
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene:[CCTransitionShrinkGrow transitionWithDuration:0.5f scene:[GameplayLayer scene]]];
This is the standard way of replacing the current scene with a new one. My question is, given that format, how would I pass a preloaded asset to the new GameplayLayer? Is there an accepted way of doing this in cocos2D? I have a feeling that I’m missing something incredibly simple, but as of now it’s a mystery to me.
Cocos2d uses a texture cache that persists between scenes. You can preload assets into this cache in a loading scene and they will still be available from your game scene. How you load these are up to you. For images you can opt to do it asynchronously, to allow your loading scene to maintain a decent framerate and render a progress bar.
This post gets the basic idea across.
This thread may also be of use to you in that regard: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/2242
If you have your own class of assets (i.e. not a supported cocos2d image, or something), you could create your own cache singleton class (look at how the sharedManager instances of various cocos2d classes are implemented) and load your assets into that. As far as memory management goes you’d have to release those assets yourself whenever you deem necessary, but that’s rather beyond the scope of this question.