How to set multiple animations in cocos2d-x

Question

I'm currently starting with cocos2d-x to build games for blackberry/android/iOS.

I have the png and plist for the animations of a character created with texturepacker. I load them with CCSpriteBatchNode and CCSpriteFrameCache then I use a function created by me that loads all frames into an array of frames, then create a CCAnimation object and store the CCAnimate object created with the animation (code is more clear) the thing is that I have a function that detect touches and it is supposed to cycle through all animations, but it always crashes.

here is some code (this goes in the init()):

_batchNode = CCSpriteBatchNode::create("Character/girl.png");
_cache = CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache();

_cache->addSpriteFramesWithFile("Personajes/girl.plist");

_character = CCSprite::createWithSpriteFrameName("girlneutral1.png");
_character->setPosition(ccp(winSize.width * 0.1, winSize.height * 0.5));
_batchNode->addChild(_character, 1);
this->addChild(_batchNode);
createAnimation(0, "girlpush", 8, 0.15f);
createAnimation(1, "girlneutral", 4, 0.3f);
createAnimation(2, "girlcrash", 12, 0.3f);
createAnimation(3, "girljump", 12, 0.2f);
createAnimation(4, "girltrick", 12, 0.3f);

_character->runAction(CCRepeatForever::create( _charanimation[3]));

this->setTouchEnabled(true);

the function that loads the animations (_charanimation[] is just an array of CCAnimate):

void HelloWorld::createAnimation(int a, CCString animation_name, int frames, float delay)
{
    CCArray* animframes = CCArray::createWithCapacity(frames);
    char str[100] = {0};
    for(int i = 1; i <= frames; i++)
    {
        sprintf(str, "%s%d.png", animation_name.getCString(), i);
        CCSpriteFrame* frame = _cache->spriteFrameByName( str );
        animframes->addObject(frame);
    }
    _charanimation[a] = CCAnimate::create(CCAnimation::createWithSpriteFrames(animframes, delay));
    //_charanimation[a]->getAnimation()->setLoops(-1);
}

and I get the animation to work (the one I set with runAction()) but if I try to change the animation, for example, when I touch the screen:

void HelloWorld::ccTouchesBegan(cocos2d::CCSet* touches, cocos2d::CCEvent* event)
{
    action++;
    action%=5;
    _character->stopAllActions();
    _character->runAction( CCRepeatForever::create(_charanimation[action]));
    char str[100];
    sprintf(str, "Animation: %d", action);
    pLabel->setString(str);

}

it crashes... I don't know if I am doing it wrong, if anyone could help, I will appreciate.

If I change the animation in runAction() it shows the animation correctly, but I can't change ingame with touches.

by the way, this is the error I get in console:

cocos2d-x debug info Assert failed: reference count should greater than 0
In function retain -- ..\..\cocoa\CCObject.cpp:92 m_uReference > 0 -- assertion failed

Answer 1

You should retain each animation created in the last line of HelloWorld::createAnimation(). something like _charanimation[a]->retain(). And later when this class is getting destroyed (in HelloWorld::~HelloWorld() or whenever you don't need animations any more) you should release all those classes you retained the animations to mark they are not needed any more. Note that you should not delete anything, if those animations where needed in some other class, deleting them will result in that other class malfunctioning. And if it's not needed anywhere else, releasing an instance of CCObject (grand parent of all cocos2dx objects) will automatically delete that instance which means that object will be deleted twice that will result in access violation.