Cocos2d and concurrency: how to properly stop animations between scenes - objective-c

Question

I got a GameScene (here called ShooterScene) and I do exit to a MainMenu. I do use sprite sheets which I load in a texture cache. There are various animations going on (on background elements, enemies, player etc...). I had for months an issue where there was an assertion failure on the "setTexture" method for the Enemies. I solved this by pausing the shared CCDirector before replacing the scene. This has the effect of stopping the animations. However I solved this only partially. The game doesn't crash anymore on the Enemy setTexture but now crashes on the AnimatedBackgroundElement setTexture method.
The background elements are added to a sprite batch node that is child of the Background class that is added as child to the GameScene. I do wonder if, for some hierarchy reasons, there is some delay in the propagation of the pause call or if there are some concurrency problems between the "pause" thread and the CCAnimate->setTexture thread of the background element.
Any suggestions/ideas?
PS: I checked the "[[CCDirector sharedDirector] stopAnimation]" and it says:
CCLOG(#"cocos2d: Director#stopAnimation. Override me");
Am I meant to "override" this method to solve issues described above? I guess that this would be a good place to really stop all the animation of all the children with a recursive call but again, I am not sure on the latency due to the potential concurrency with the subsequent "replaceScene" method. I could solve this by using a sequence of callbacks (CCSequence with action1 = call stop animation and action2= replace scene) but again I am not 100% sure on the fact that the call of action2 will happen only after the end of the call to stop animation (action1). I could pheraphs write a recursive for (all children) and place that before the replaceScene.. or callback the replaceScene with a delay (which would not be an elegant solution as it would be semi-arbitrary)..
-(void) restartLevel
{
[self resetSharedData];
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] pause];
LevelName currentLevel = [GameController sharedGameController].currentlyPlayedLevelName;
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene:[ShooterScene sceneWithLevelName:currentLevel]];
}
-(void) exitToMainMenu
{
[self resetSharedData];
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] pause];
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene:[MainMenu scene]];
}
PPS: I see that there are various related posts on trying to stop a scene. I guess other people might have similar issues so there is probably a state-of-the art solution/design pattern for this.
EDIT: I have tried implementing this but it still fails.
-(void) restartLevel
{
[self resetSharedData];
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] pause];
LevelName currentLevel = [GameController sharedGameController].currentlyPlayedLevelName;
[self stopAllActions]; //Does this actually stopAllActions and Animations for ALL child nodes?
[self unscheduleAllSelectors];
//Do I need something else here?
[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene:[ShooterScene sceneWithLevelName:currentLevel]];
}

Answer 1

[self stopAllActions]; not really stop all actions added to layer's child node. You need to manually call stopAllActions on particular node.
-(void)onExit
{
[self.gameHeroSprite stopAllActions]; //call this for all animated sprite
[self stopAllActions];
[super onExit];
}

Answer 2

Stupid question, why is [self stopAllAnimations]; not working? I call that and [self unscheduleAllSelectors]; before a scene change, it whacks every animated object and timer in the entire layer, which should make it safe to switch scenes without assertion failures.
With regards to the pause thing, I KNOW!! seriously, the whole pause thing is really fidgity, it seems to pause stuff but it doesn't always pause stuff. As far as I can tell, when you pause: timers stop (and the dt doesn't increase), the accelerometer and touches still work, animated objects and moving objects stop moving, and menu buttons still work and ALL the code inside the function called by a menu button still runs. Additionally it finishes all the code inside the function that calls the pause, so if you do a pause and then cancel timers and change scenes all in one function, you'll still get an allocation error.
Here's what I do, more specifically:
- Stop all animations
- Stop all timers
- set a variable "gameRunning" to false, and on the first line of gameLogic if(!gameRunning) return;
- Set a timer for 0.1 seconds to only fire once to call a makeTransition function
- Make the actual scene change inside the timer.