There’s already a projectile class in the items.m you can start there. You’ll have to speed up the travel distance per delta by at least 3x, maybe more.

It’s going to be a little tougher than you might have initially planned. Collision detection has to play a part as well. Yes you’re right about the update being declared in a parent.

1) how to get the player sprite to play the “attack sword animation” while shooting out bullets

This one isn’t so bad and can be solved by using the code from the attack method in the character.m
You can basically ignore the pointtoward part and just run the animation section when you shoot.

2) To get those bullets to hit the enemy

Think about this one and how you want it to behave. Bullet’s don’t target the enemy per se, things (enemies) just happen to be standing where the vector directs the bullets to. Unless of course you develop a gun item that fires ‘smart’ bullets that seek the enemy. But don’t worry, firing ‘dumb’ bullets is easy. Just create them, send them on their way, and let collision detection do the rest.

3) To integrate the classes with everything else.

You’re object oriented, so once you create the bullet object, it should ‘know’ what it’s doing as far as where it’s going and when it hits something. This means your update delta method in the bullet class will have to have collision detection.

4) To make sure those bullets are tied to the appropriate sprites.

Here is the shotarrow class which is a child of the projectile class.

Replace the arrow.png with your bullet.png
adjust the speed, damage, and maxlife. Using the maxlife instead of trying to detect when it leaves the screen is a much slicker way of dealing with the object. No need to reinvent the wheel. Note the can hit player in the update that checks to see if it hit an enemy. You’ll need to change this to a look that checks the enemies in the level to see if it has found/hit any of them. This is where you will likely want to check to see if it hit other solid objects also (like walls or other obstacles)
And don’t forget to change the vector creation to direct the bullet object in the direction your player is facing instead of a vector toward where the player is.

@implementation ShotArrow
	-(id) init
	{
		return [super initWithImage:@"arrow.png"];
	}
	-(void) onEnter
	{
		[super onEnter];
		if( vector.x == 0.0f && vector.y == 0.0f )
		{
			// establish a vector toward player
			float angle = ccpToAngle(ccpSub([self getPlayer].position, self.position));
			angle += (CCRANDOM_MINUS1_1() * M_PI * 0.125f);
			vector = ccpForAngle(angle);
			// rotate arrow
			sprite.rotation = ((-angle + (M_PI / 2.0f)) / M_PI) * 180.0f;
			sprite.scale = 0.8f;
		}
		if( speed == 0.0f )
		{
			speed = 300.0f;
			damage = 1.5f;
			maxLife = life = 5.0f; // long life means it will travel further and be more visible
		}
	}
	-(void) update:(ccTime)delta
	{
		// use Projectile's update method to move
		[super update:delta];
		// can hit player?
		if( [self isNearPlayer:35.0f] )
		{
			[[self getPlayer] changeLife:-damage quiet:NO];
			[self destroy];
		}
	}
@end

@interface BulletCache : CCNode
{
	CCSpriteBatchNode* batch;
	int nextInactiveBullet;
}

I keep getting an error on the CCSpriteBatchNode* batch; compile error says
[quote]expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘CCSpriteBatchNode’[/quote]

Am I incorrectly importing the Bullet and BulletCache classe into the Quexlor files?

Here’s my Quexlor.h file:

#import "iPhoneGameKit.h"
#import "GameState.h"
#import "Game.h"
#import "LevelObject.h"
#import "Character.h"
#import "Bullet.h"
#import "BulletCache.h"
#import "Player.h"
#import "Enemies.h"
#import "Items.h"
#import "Triggers.h"
#import "Hud.h"
#import "MainMenu.h"
#import "CharacterMenu.h"
#import "VictoryMenu.h"
#import "AboutMenu.h"
#import "Level.h"

My Bullet.h file

#import "Quexlor.h"
@interface Bullet : CCSprite
{
	CGPoint velocity;
	float outsideScreen;
}
//more code

my BulletCache

#import "Bullet.h"
#import BulletCache.h"
//code

The author writes that the BulletCache class is a “an in-between” CCNode. The BulletCache keeps an array of bullets instead of creating and releasing bullet objects over and over again.

BulletCache also has the shootBulletAt method which was modified to take three parameters.

-(BulletCache*) bulletCache
{
CCNode* node = [self getChildByTag:GameSceneNodeTagBulletCache];
NSAssert([node isKindOfClass:[BulletCache class]], @”not a BulletCache”);
return (BulletCache*)node;
}

However, in trying to integrate this code into the Quexlor project, I may have forgotten a key piece of code. The author writes that I also need to add a bulletCache accessor so other classes can access the BulletCache instance through the GameScene:

-(BulletCache*) bulletCache
{
CCNode* node = [self getChildByTag:GameSceneNodeTagBulletCache];
NSAssert([node isKindOfClass:[BulletCache class]], @"not a BulletCache");
return (BulletCache*)node;
}

I didn’t implement that yet, so that may be the next piece of the puzzle.

Although the author writes that his BulletCache is a child of the GameScene class, and mine is not. Is there a particular way you do that?

His BulletCache interface says:

@interface BulletCache : CCNode

which I thought just means its a child of the CCNode class.

joeb, thanks for the feedback, I am going to try this. I guess my only real hangup is conceptualizing, apart from my incredible newness to the material. I did read and complete Kochan’s book on objec-c so I have some background, but still, it can get very dizzying.

So I deleted both the bulletCache and Bullet Class References, and the game compiles successfully. However, when I swing the sword, the destroyTile method is called, and if there is no enemy on that tile, the game crashes, but only if there is no enemy. The console error says
[Player destroyTileCallback:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6887590'

Any help or suggestions?

Here’s the destroyTile definition:

-(void) destroyTile
	{
		// start animating the swing, when finished try to destroy a tile
		CCAction* action = [CCSequence actions:
			[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:[profile getAnimation:@"attack" index:currentDir]],
			[CCCallFuncN actionWithTarget:self selector:@selector(destroyTileCallback:)],
			nil];
		action.tag = kActionAttack;
		[sprite runAction:action];
	}

It is odd though. All I did was delete the Bullet/BulletCache class references and then all of the sudden, this completely random method goes haywire on me. Wonder why that is.

I’m also looking for the player.attack method, but I can’t find the damn thing. I looked in the Hud, Character, and Player classes, but neither has that method explicitly stated.

In the Character class I found the -(void) attack:(Character*)attackee method:

-(void) attack:(Character*)attackee
	{
		// get direction for animation
		[self pointToward:attackee.position];
		// create attack sequence (animation + gotHit callback)
		CCAction* action = [CCSequence actions:
			[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:[profile getAnimation:@"attack" index:currentDir]],
			[CCCallFuncND actionWithTarget:attackee selector:@selector(gotHit:data:) data:self],
			nil];
		action.tag = kActionAttack;
		[sprite runAction:action];
	}

thanks joeb, what I was planning was copy-pasting that -(void)attack method’s definition in the player class with the following:

-(void) attack:(Player*)attackee
{
		// create attack sequence (animation + gotHit callback)
		CCAction* action = [CCSequence actions:
			[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:[profile getAnimation:@"attack" index:currentDir]],
			[CCCallFuncND actionWithTarget:attackee selector:@selector(gotHit:data:) data:self],
			nil];
		action.tag = kActionAttack;
		[sprite runAction:action];
               //set the position, velocity, and sprite frames before shooting
              CGPoint shootPos = CGPointMake(player.position.x + [player contentSize] width * 0.5f,
                                                                                                                                        ship.position.y;
             float spread = (CCRANDOM_0_1() - 0.5f) * 0.5f;
             CGPoint velocity = CGPointMake (1, spread);
            [bulletCache shootBulletAt: shootPos velocity:velocity
                                                                                           frameName:@"bullet.png"];
}

hey joeb, idk if you saw my last post, but could you post the projectile code? It’s not part of my Quexlor