Is this a good way to manage my view controller stack?

Question

I have a lot of modal view controllers for my game. And so I need a way to pop my view controllers off the stack so that I don't have too many view controllers on the stack.

So say I have vc 1 that segues to vc 2, that segues to vc3, and vc3 segues to vc1.

When it segues back to vc 1, should I call,

[self.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES]; ?

Also, in order to replay my game, all I did was have a replay button that segues to its own vc. And I was told this was a bad idea, so is it ok if whenever I hit that replay button I call [self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES]; ?

The reason I want it to segue to its own vc is because I want the cool cross dissolve animation that happens when you segue modally.

If I do all this will it work without problems?

Answer 1

You are doing everything right for everything but the self -> self transitions.

You should just have an animation.

For example:

 - (void)reset
{
    [self resetInternalModelState];

    [self animateWithDuration:duration animations:^{
        // Logic to dissolve your view.
    }];

    [self reloadModelData];
}

If you imagine that you have a method that resets the state, and a method that reloads the views based on your internal model data, this will do exactly what you want, without abusing the animation freebies you get from view controller transitions.