When to use CCScene vs CCLayer?

Question

I'm kind of a UI buff - every "screen" in my game should transition in/out when it appears or disappears. Because my game is simple in terms of resources, I thought I'd just make each "screen" a CCLayer and define a function for the transitions, leaving everything in memory. It's turning out to be more complicated than I expected.

I think I have two main problems right now:

1) Each "screen" is a CCLayer. This looks fine, but I can't seem to stop receiving touch events, even when they are inactive. Child sprites do not seem to respect the isTouchEnabled property, so I'm hitting invisible buttons all the time.

2) I wrote a custom button class that is basically a sprite with a few separate textures for states. It uses the CCTargetedTouchDelegate protocol. I'm thinking this is a big part of the above problem.

I'm not quite clear on the CCMenu stuff. Is there a tutorial or documentation out there that better explains its designed purpose and how to use it? The documentation for cocos2d doesn't talk at all about what each class does, which makes it much, much harder to properly use the library. Also, when should I use a scene instead of layers? Can I write custom transitions?

Answer 1

It's more convenient to use CCScenes for menus. All of the children of an inactive CCScene will not receive touch events, so you don't have to manage that behavior. CCScenes also have built-in transitions like a crossfade, but if you're like me, you'll probably just want to run an action to make the scene transition out, then call CCDirector:replaceScene.

Answer 2

I found that if you have multiple layers in a single scene for menus, such as for a main menu (simpler to have a layer for load game, new game, etc. than an entire scene) that if you add all of you buttons as children of the layer; then to stop them from receiving touches, simply move the layer off screen when not in use. Heres an example.

[loadLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(-1000,-1000)];
[settingsLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(-1000,-1000)];
[menuLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(0,0)];

And each time you select a button that would take you to say the load game layer just reverse it for the right layer.

[loadLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(0,0)];
[settingsLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(-1000,-1000)];
[menuLayer setPosition:CGPointMake(-1000,-1000)];