What is SKSpinLockSync in Sprite Kit and how do I fix it

Question

I am receiving a bug report with the following stack trace and I have no idea what the problem is. I\'ve seen suggestions that this could be caused by having an emitter\'s

Answer 1

OSSpinLock is a mechanism to ensure atomic operations in multithreaded apps.

I don't think there's a multithreading issue here, but rather loadImageData may have provided data that crashes during the atomic part of the work. This could be due to a missing (or corrupt or unsupported file format) texture in the bundle. It is certainly an emitter that causes the texture load to fail.

Try testing your app in release configuration (edit the scheme) for a while. Some bugs only surface in release builds with optimizations enabled. You could also build an adhoc version of your app and deploy it to your device and test it. Your first goal right now should be to verify the issue on your own device, otherwise it may be hard to pin down.

The call stack does give you a few hints: the problem is with a emitter that is a child of a sprite which is a child of another sprite which is a child of the scene. Perhaps that narrows it down.