Swift: Deallocate GameScene after transition to new scene?

Question

So I\'ve read several questions on this but most are in Objective-C and I haven\'t found any that address/answer this directly. I am new to programming here so please explain a

Answer 1

In my project, I used the following mechanism and it worked well. All my scenes SKScene objects were optional variables. When i need the new scene to show, i create it and present at SKView. When i need to display the new scene, I set the previous object scene object to nil, this immediately reducing the reference count by 1, and becouse of at this moment no one object is not use my scene, the reference count becomes zero and scene was deleted.

The SKScene object is a ordinary class object and ARC works with them like with all reference type objects. You only need to monitor the number of references to the scene. All are finished with the various resources I was start in deinit of SKScene object

The simple example:

At UIViewController we have optional objects of GameScene:

class GameViewController: UIViewController {
    var scene1: GameScene?
    var scene2: GameScene?
    var skView: SKView?
    
    // Action to present next Scene
    @IBAction func nextSceneAction(sender: AnyObject) {
        print("Next scene")
        // Create new GameScene object
        scene2 = GameScene(fileNamed:"GameScene")
        // Present scene2 object that replace the scene1 object
        skView!.presentScene(scene2)
        scene = nil
    }
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        // Create GameScene object
        scene = GameScene(fileNamed:"GameScene")
        skView = (self.view as! SKView)
        skView!.showsFPS = true
        skView!.showsNodeCount = true

        skView!.ignoresSiblingOrder = true
        
        scene!.scaleMode = .AspectFill
        
        // Present current scene
        skView!.presentScene(scene)
    }
}

At GameScene in deinit print some text to show that it object will be deleted:

class GameScene: SKScene {
   ...
    
    deinit {
        print("Deinit scene")
    }
}

Debug output after push the nextSceneAction button:

Next scene

Deinit scene