Animating a Sprite in Cocos2D and Spritebuilder

Question

in the project i'm working on I have multiple characters you can play as (in this case I will refer to them as drones). In my gamescene I have all the physics setup through _drone. A .CCB file created with spritebuilder. Previously I had this file animated through spritebuilder, but now with the addition of multiple drones to choose from I need to set it to display and cycle through the appropriate frames. I've been looking all day for things related to this and most answers I see are for cocos2d v2.0 or when I get something that has no errors showing in Xcode, it doesn't apply it to my _drone class. What I'm looking to do is something like this: [_drone setSpriteFrame:[CCSpriteFrame frameWithImageNamed:@"DefectiveDroneSpriteSheet/Drone1.png"]]; As this sets the frame for _drone to what I want. However I don't know how to make this cycle between the frames.

I found an answer on here recently that showed how to do it:

NSMutableArray *animationFrames = [NSMutableArray array];

for(int i = 1; i <= FRAMES; ++i)
{
    CCSpriteFrame *spriteFrame = [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"animationFrame%d.png", i]]; //
}

//Create an animation from the set of frames you created earlier
CCAnimation *animation = [CCAnimation animationWithSpriteFrames: animationFrames delay:delay];

//Create an action with the animation that can then be assigned to a sprite
CCActionAnimate *animationAction = [CCActionAnimate actionWithAnimation:animation];

CCActionRepeatForever *repeatingAnimation = [CCActionRepeatForever actionWithAction:animationAction];
[self runAction:repeatingAnimation];

Unfortunately this didn't work for me, but maybe I did something wrong. I seemed to have the most issue with the for loop/ a warning saying variable spriteFrame is never used, or something like that. The problem with this code is that after hours of messing with it and trying to find updated documentation I couldn't figure out how to do what my first example did, apply it directly to _drone. So with all that said... what should I do about solving this? Is there another easier way that i'm overlooking?

Thanks for your time, much appreciated!

edit for Guru:

Hello, thanks for responding. This is what my for loop looks like currently that is throwing me 4 warnings.

for(int i = 1; i <= 2; ++i)
{
    CCSpriteFrame *frame1 = [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"DefectiveDroneSpriteSheet/Drone1.png", i]]; //
    CCSpriteFrame *frame2 = [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"DefectiveDroneSpriteSheet/Drone1.png", i]]; //
}

I get a warning "unused variable for frame 1 and frame 2" and "data argument not used by format string" for the 'i'. Also doing this, how do I make this animation apply to my _drone object? As the object is already placed in the scene through Spritebuilder?

Second Edit:

- (void)didLoadFromCCB {

    NSMutableArray *animationFrames = [NSMutableArray array];

    for(int i = 1; i <= 2; ++i)
    {
        CCSpriteFrame *spriteFrame = [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"DroneSpriteSheets%d.png", i]]; //
        [animationFrames addObject: spriteFrame];
    }

    //Create an animation from the set of frames you created earlier
    CCAnimation *animation = [CCAnimation animationWithSpriteFrames: animationFrames delay:1.0f];

    //Create an action with the animation that can then be assigned to a sprite
    CCActionAnimate *animationAction = [CCActionAnimate actionWithAnimation:animation];

    CCActionRepeatForever *repeatingAnimation = [CCActionRepeatForever actionWithAction:animationAction];
    [_drone runAction:repeatingAnimation];

    //-----------------------------------------------------------

Thats the relevant part of my code, i get this error:

* Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '* -[__NSArrayM insertObject:atIndex:]: object cannot be nil'

Guru Guru · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-21T05:40:30

You are not adding frames in array:

for(int i = 1; i <= FRAMES; ++i)
{
    CCSpriteFrame *spriteFrame = [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"animationFrame%d.png", i]]; //
    [animationFrames addObject: spriteFrame];

}

Animating a Sprite in Cocos2D and Spritebuilder

1 Answers