CCSprite is not displaying on the iPhone - iphone

Question

I am trying to make a sprite display on the screen in Cocos2d. But, I don't want to use a CCSprite directly. I have a class Unit which will have some additional properties that I will need later on in my game. The class declaration of Unit is as follows:
#interface Unit : CCSprite {
CCSprite *sprite;
}
-(void)init;
#property(nonatomic, retain) NSNumber *type;
#property(nonatomic, retain) CCSprite *sprite;
#end
And my init method for it looks like this:
-(void)init {
self.sprite = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:#"BasicUnit.png"];
self.sprite.position = ccp(50, 100);
}
Now what I need to do is apply it to the screen. So, I have another class called Playscene which is the scene where I want to display sprites and things. Here is what the init method (the method that should draw the sprites) looks like in Playscene:
-(id) init {
if( (self=[super init] )) {
self.isTouchEnabled = YES;
[army init];
[self addChild:army.sprite];
}
return self;
}
But, when I run this I get a ton of error data including: "terminate called after throwing an instance of 'NSException'" and probably of more importance: "Assertion failure in -[PlayScene addChild:]". I don't know how I can solve this. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Based on your snippets it is very difficult to know what goes wrong. That said I assume that army in your last snipped is of type Unit. But because that is inside the init() method it could be that it is nil because it is not created here like in army = [[Unit] alloc] initXXX];.
That said I am not sure what you want to accomplish with subclassing CCSprite in your Unit class because you are referencing CCSpirit and so there is not need to subclass it.
Finally your Assertion is probably because your army.spirit is either NIL or it is already added and the assertion inside Coco2d throws the exception (I am assuming that the last snippet is from a subclass of CCNode).
My suggestions:
Don't extend CCSpirit in Unit (not needed as far as I can see)
Don't have a method - (void) init but overwrite - (id) init
Make sure army is properly instantiated using [[Unit alloc] init] (see point above)
Using alloc you need to make sure that if it is assigned to a retaining property that you also release it to offset the alloc.
Hope that helps.