Anyone that can give any hint of the smartest way to do a main loop animation? I don't want to use CCAnimation because I want to control the animations frame by frame.
Shall I store the sprite rect (relative to the sprite sheet) for each individual frame in an array, and then look up the suiting rect in each animation step? I tried to find out how this is done in CCAnimation, but I didn't succeed...
Cannot crealry understand, why you don't want to use CCAnimation, but anyway, to get answer for your questions you can check creation code of the CCSprite instance. Then, check creation of CCSpriteFrame instance. There you will find the answer for at least your first question.
Actually if you just want to manage animation frames differently from CCAnimate, you can just store array of CCSpriteFrames and show them as you want(in CCAnimate action these frames are just changed one by one in equal time intervals).
And if you do not want to show more than one frame of your animation, there is no difference will you use CCSpriteBatchNode or not. It saves a lot of processor time if you need to draw several parts of one texture, as it draws them in one draw
call instead of send draw
message to all of these sprites.