How to make nodes shoot particles in different sequences/patterns? - ios

Question

I'm trying to set up a group of 16 nodes to shoot particles in sequences to form patterns.
I'm able to activate them all at once, with different particle systems on different nodes, but I can't get the nodes to activate in a sequential fashion.
The particle system itself is already looping active and inactive.
Maybe this is the wrong approach and I should use Actions, but I don't know.
There's a while (self.fWorksequence == 2) calling the Sequence2(), that does activate the particles on the nodes that I need, but it's all at the same time. I need to have them lag: Node f1 fires, wait 1 second, nodes f2 and f16 fire simultaneously, wait another second, nodes f3 and f15 fire simultaneously.
var fWCycle = 1
func Sequence2() {
if self.fWCycle == 1 {
sceneView.scene.rootNode.enumerateChildNodes { (node, _) in
if node.name == "f1" {
let fWorkBoom = self.launchFWork1(color: UIColor.red)
node.addParticleSystem(fWorkBoom)
}
}
} else if self.fWCycle == 31 {
sceneView.scene.rootNode.enumerateChildNodes { (node, _) in
if node.name == "f2" {
let fWorkBoom = self.launchFWork1(color: UIColor.red)
node.addParticleSystem(fWorkBoom)
}
if node.name == "f16" {
let fWorkBoom = self.launchFWork1(color: UIColor.red)
node.addParticleSystem(fWorkBoom)
}
}
}
...
//check the cycle stage
if self.fWCycle <= 100 {
self.fWCycle += 1
} else if self.fWCycle > 600 {
self.fWorkSequence = 1
}
}
*Edit
tried with
func Sequence2() {
timer = Timer.scheduledTimer(timeInterval: 2.0, target: self, selector: #selector(timerAction), userInfo: nil, repeats: true)
}
and then
var timer = Timer()
var nodeCounter = 0
#objc func timerAction() {
self.nodeCounter += 1
if self.nodeCounter == 1 {
self.sceneView.scene.rootNode.enumerateChildNodes { (node, _) in
if node.name == "f1" {
let fWorkBoom = self.launchFWork1(color: UIColor.red)
node.addParticleSystem(fWorkBoom)
}
}
}...
}
And now the memory crashes the app...

Answer 1

I couldn't figure out how to do it with code, tried Timers and Loops and either got nothing to work, or constant crashes due to memory issues.
So I ended up solving by animating the whole thing in Blender and then importing that file with all the correct times to xcode. Worked perfectly.
If anyone finds this in the future, I would still like to know how to do it by code.
Thank you!