Deallocate SKScene after transition to another SKScene in SpriteKit

Question

I have a view controller that has three skscenes as children.

When I transition from one to another, the old skscene doesn\'t get deallocated.

I want it to g

Answer 1

I am just starting out with SpriteKit in Swift and I had the same problem: My intro scene was playing some music that I wanted to stop after transitioning to the main menu scene, and I figured the deinit would be a good place to put the AVAudioPlayer.stop() call in, but deinit was never being called.

After looking around I learned that it may be because of some strong references to the scene, so in my GameViewController:UIViewController subclass I changed this code:

let intro = IntroScene(size: skView.bounds.size)
skView.presentScene(intro)

to

skView.presentScene(IntroScene(size: skView.bounds.size))

and in the intro scene, that I wanted to be deallocated, I changed

let mainMenu  = MainMenuScene(size: self.size)
let crossFade = SKTransition.crossFadeWithDuration(1)

self.scene.view.presentScene(mainMenu, transition: crossFade)

to

self.scene.view.presentScene(MainMenuScene(size: self.size),
                             transition: SKTransition.crossFadeWithDuration(1))

and it worked! After the transition was complete the deinit method got called.

I assume that the outgoing scene was not being deinitialized because there were variables holding references to it.