Physics Categories/Masks changes not saved, published or read consistently

[LearnCocos2D]

What I have observed repeatedly today goes something like so:

• I try to make 2 objects not collide with each other (for instance: static body A and a complex chain object B with multiple nodes connected with pivot joints)
• I make the necessary changes to categories/masks (all nodes in the chain)
• I observe that the bodies are still colliding in code
• I keep making changes to cats and masks to no avail, even changing them to the opposite of what I think should be working because I'm no longer 100% confident that how I think the way they are supposed to work is actually the way they do work
• I turn to some other task
• eventually I notice that A and B are no longer colliding, as originally intended (huh??!?)
• I check that categories for A and B are unchanged, I then change them to make the two bodies collide again
• The two bodies are still NOT colliding (WTF???)
• I make more changes to cats/masks, no change, bodies still not colliding
• I turn to some other task, making other changes in SB
• Eventually I notice that the two bodies collide once more

I tried several times to reproduce the issue instantly, assuming that cat/mask changes may not be properly saved or published unless some other change is made elsewhere, unless a "Save All" has been issued, unless the CCBs have been modified so that SB actually marks them as modified. I also cleaned caches and Xcode build folder several times, I pulled the latest SB develop commit and updated my project's cocos2d-iphone folder to the one used by the latest SB. So far I have not been able to reproduce the issue instantly. It just seems like behavior changes only occasionally after some time, or some other changes to the project.

Eventually I considered two options:

• There's a weird, obnoxious save/publish/read bug regarding categories and masks
• I'm completely insane

Though the second option seemed the probable choice I decided I should at least try and make some kind of project where one of the issues is consistently reproducible. ;)

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Here's the project to reproduce an issue where the Categories setting of a sprite node in SpriteBuilder is set to "border" but when logged in the game, the same node reports (null) for the category. Coincidentally it's the last node in the list. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0g1SgyD5RH2c2dyN1dlQmFXWWs/edit?usp=sharing

More info about the project:

• open in SB and check Prefabs/Borders/Border3.ccb. Notice Categories is set to "border"
• in Level1.ccb two different borders and two chains are placed, each chain intersecting a border
• publish project (I removed the published files to reduce file size)
• build & launch project
• observe how upper static border allows chain to pass through freely
• observe how lower static border blocks chain (eventually lower chain will move erratically due to accumulating constraint forces because it is stuck)
• tap screen once to log node info to the console, observe the last line reads as follows:

lower border3 (static): group=(null), type= cats=(null) mask=(null)

Notice that the last node is the one Border3.ccb instance that should have its collisionCategories field set to "border".

I'm guessing this is an off-by-one error or otherwise not correctly handling the last physics body in a CCB because this issue appears to have been shifting around randomly in my project but only after editing unrelated nodes.

[LearnCocos2D]

One more thing I want to mention:

I have observed twice that checking or unchecking the chain joint's "Spring Enabled" property (of all physics nodes in the chain.ccb) can affect whether two instances of Chain.ccb will collide with one another or not. In each instance the behavior was fully reproducible by repeatedly turning Spring Enabled on or off, except that in one case turning on Spring Enabled made the objects collide, in the other case it made them not collide.

This may or may not be related to the above issue.