Cocos2d CCFollow when there are multiple layers

Question

Essentially, when I have one CCLayer for background and platform sprites and another for player sprite and HUD, how should I go about calling CCFollow if I want my camera to always center at the player with the HUD in the same layer moving accordingly as well?

Right now the background layer is a subclass of CCLayer that has a CCSpriteBatchNode for drawing objects in the environment. It contains an instance variable CCLayer *HudLayer that has a CCMenu and another CCSpriteBatchNode for the player animation sprites. They are both direct children of a CCScene, meaning HudLayer is not a children of BackgroundLayer. I'm now calling the CCFollow as [self runAction:[CCFollow actionWithTarget:playerSprite worldBoundary:worldRect]] where self is the BackgroundLayer.

The camera follows the box2d physics body of the player correctly, and the menu moves with it too, but whenever the camera moves, let's say to the right, the player sprite moves twice as fast to the right, leaving its physics body behind. So after moving to the right for a bit the playerSprite is outside of screen. playerSprite.pos and playerSprite.position seem to have nothing wrong though.

I've tried calling the CCFollow in different places but either the HUD refuses to move or the camera won't move or the player moves weirdly. What's wrong with it?

I would recommend having the player sprite and HUD separately. That way you can track the movement of the sprite, and leave the position of the HUD the same. You should be moving each layer around and not the entire scene. By doing that the hud will stay in place — Brandon Lassiter
Thank you Brandon! I solved my problem a couple hours ago and it's exactly what you said. I put the player sprite to be on the background layer instead and everything works fine now. I guess I need to brush up on some cocos2d basics. — wc373

wc373 wc373 · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-30T22:10:10

I FIGURED IT OUT! The key here is to put the player sprite in some layer other than the HUD layer. I added my CCSpriteBatchNode for the player sprites as a child of backgroundLayer instead of the HudLayer without changing anything else and it worked.

So basically everything that needs to always stay on screen as the HUD should be in one layer, while the target node for CCFollow should be in a separate layer (in the background in my case). The caller layer of CCFollow should contain the target node as a direct child. This tutorial helped me a great deal: http://www.raywenderlich.com/4666/how-to-create-a-hud-layer-with-cocos2d

Cocos2d CCFollow when there are multiple layers

1 Answers