How to replicate the effect of a ccsprite being a child of another but using a batch node?

Question

The game I'm designing uses multiple nested CCSprites, so that when the parent sprite moves, rotates, scales, etc. the child sprite does as well, automatically, and so do its grandchildren.

It works great but bogs down very quickly since I haven't implemented batch nodes, currently it's making over 4000 draw calls at once which is obviously not optimal.

However as far as I know the only way to use batch nodes is to make all the sprites a child of the batch node. I thought maybe I could add each parent to the batch node and then add the rest as children of that one but that doesn't work.

Any ideas? I'd like to avoid having to manually calculate the position, rotation, scale, etc of each child sprite every time its parent moves, which at the moment seems to be the only way I can think of to make this work.

Answer 1

Looks like you CAN in fact nest children inside a ccsprite and have them be a part of the batch node, as long as the parent is a child of the batch node. When I first tried this I'd simply forgotten to change "spriteWithFile:" to "spriteWithSpriteFrameName:" when I created the children of one of the sprites. Now it works perfetly, all in one batch node, with one draw call. Hooray!