Trouble with getChildByTag (cocos2d iPhone)

I have a scene called Level1, which takes the hero and the enemy from a layer called GameLayer. I heard that an efficient way of doing this is using tags and retrieving it using getChildByTag. I tried this out, but I'm having many issues. I'm using SneakyInput. On Level1, there is a leftJoystick (for enemy movement), and a rightJoystick (for firing projectiles). I have an addEnemy and addHero method in my GameLayer, which I call. Everything I've mentioned works.

In my Level1 scene I have a method called moveHero (which obviously is supposed to move the hero with the joystick.). Through basic debugging I know the problem is the geteChildByTag line. I test 开发者_如何学Cout the hero's position through NSLog, and it's saying 0,0. Which is weird because on screen you can see the hero. But I also realized I'm calling the addHero method without using getChildByTag.

I hope I'm being clear here. I've uploaded GameLayer.h and GameLayer.m onto 4shared. http://www.4shared.com/file/PqhjoMFy/GameLayer.html

Hopefully you can take a look at it and point me in the right direction.

BTW: There are no errors or crashes. It's just not working.

Thanks in advance.

getChildByTag will never crash, it's a pretty nicely coded method that just loops through the children array of the object and checks to see if any objects match, that way you don't get assertion issues.

You have some serious issues here with your code.

Firstly..

GameLayer *heroInstance = [[GameLayer alloc] init];
CCSprite *hero = (CCSprite *)[heroInstance getChildByTag:1];
NSLog(@"Hero position X: %f", hero.position.x);
NSLog(@"Hero position Y: %f", hero.position.y);

This will never work, heroInstance is a brand new object, it has no children, also you've just created a memory leak here.

Your hero is a child of the spritesheet, which is a child of the scene.

To reference your child you must call getChildByTag on your spritesheet (which you probably need to reference by calling getChildByTag on your scene..

something like this.

[[self getChildByTag:spritesheet] getChildByTag:hero];

Also, use an enum, so that you don't have to remember what numbers certain tags are (look at the cocos2d example projects).