After reading a couple chapters from the cocos2d-x book and a few articles and the documentation. I still do not understand what retain() , and cc_safe_release and autorelease() do and why we need them?
Is it a scope thing? Where when you leave a function the objects go out of scope?
In what specific senario or senario’s do we need to retain()?
Thanks in advance.
Because everything in Cocos is a CCObject, which manages memory for you by reference counting.
if in the next cycle, a CCObject is unused, it will be released.
retain() tells the autoreleasepool that you plan to use it later
a typical scenario is when you create some sprites that you want to add to a layer later, if you don’t retain them, they will be released, and become unusable the next update cycle