One the annoying changes introduced in cocos2d-x 3.0 is changing the copy method to clone. I don’t know why honestly, but it silently changes the return value from a retained object to an autoreleased object >.<
Since copy is based on the Objective-C copy method, developers expected it to return an object with a retain count of one, which it did. So, you would have to manage the memory yourself:
auto object = otherObject->copy()
object->doSomething();
object->release();
Unfortunately, if my use case was the code above, I wouldn’t have spent 10 minutes trying to find the cause of the crash. I did something asynchronous with the copied object, hence it crashed on a different runloop, making it 10x harder to debug >.<
In any case, from now on, use the new clone method, since copy is deprecated, and make sure you keep in mind that it’s autoreleased!!