Question

I recently posted a question here about some memory issues I was having. I’ve got that fixed now thanks to this wonderful community but I’m facing another problem. I’m using Cocos2d to develop a game and I’m trying to remove a Sprite from and array. The problem arises when I try and release the temporary array I’m using to keep track of the sprites to remove.

    NSMutableArray *spritesToRemove = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

    // Loop through all sprites
    for(CSSprite *sprite in _sprites){
        if(sprite.toRemove){
            [spritesToRemove addObject: sprite];
        }
    }

    // loop through sprites to be removed
    for(CSSprite *removeableSprite in spritesToRemove){

        [_sprites removeObject: removeableSprite];

        // Cocos2d code to remove a sprite
        [self removeChild: removeableSprite cleanup: YES]; 
    }

    [spritesToRemove release]; // EXC_BAD_ACCESS error 

I get a feeling the reason I’m getting the error is because I’m releasing the sprite object in [self removeChild: removeableSprite cleanup: YES]; before actually releasing the array. It all works fine if I remove the line [spritesToRemove release] but I obviously then have a memory leak on my hands.

I’ve tried moving the removal of the sprites around and I can get the memory thing sorted by completely omitting the line [self removeChild: removeableSprite cleanup: YES]; but then Cocos2d throws the same EXC_BAD_ACCESS error from within CCNode at [child visit]; of -(void) visit

Thanks again for your help 🙂

EDIT: I enabled NSZombie and I got this message:

*** -[Sprite release]: message sent to deallocated instance 0xfa94cf0

Which to me kind of suggests my initial thought, somewhere an entry in the array is being released to soon. Would that be correct? If so is there anyway for me to find out where?

Answer 1

I managed to find the issue (and to be honest I feel a little silly 😛 ). I was releasing the sprite manually once I added it to the array, which wasn’t in the code provided so you guys couldn’t have found it. The sprite was already set up to be autoreleased and thus was being cleared twice – causing my error.