Thread: Create generic classes to be specified later?

Yeah, I forgot I was working with std::string, I just didn't think about it because that wasn't my main problem, but I appreciate you guys reminding me. Direct comparison is much easier and less bloated than the old C-style string way; bad habits from Win32 API programming mixed with C, bleh.

Anyways, I wrote a virtual draw function in my base Sprite class, and now it works perfectly!

pheres:
That looks incredibly more efficient and EXACTLY what I was looking for, I was just about to ask if there was any other more efficient way than to compare each string like that. I hate repetitive programming as there are almost always better, faster, and slimmer ways to code it. Thanks a lot everybody, I'm off to check out std::map and then continue my project! woo!

one way you could create the dictionary without using function pointers (I find code using function pointers to be very C-like, so personally I prefer to avoid them if there's an easy workaround) -

Code:

class ISpriteCreator  //Sprite Creator interface
{
public:
    virtual Sprite* Create(int int) = 0;
};

template<class ConcreteSprite>
class SpriteCreator : public ISpriteCreator
{
public:
    Sprite* Create(int x, int y)
    {
        return new ConcreteSprite(x, y);
    }
};

// .. dictionary mapping strings to sprite creators

std::map<std::string, ISpriteCreator*> dictionary;
dictionary.insert( std::make_pair( "LeftCloud", new SpriteCreator<LeftCloud> () )  );

Alright yeah, that looks good. I'll give that a try.
But one other thing, when I did this:

Code:

SpriteFactory* factory = new ConcreteFactory();
Sprite* test = factory->getSprite(0);
...
test->draw();

It worked perfectly. However, when I try ANY other value than 0 here (and yes, the numbers I tried are valid numbers for the sprite index) I get a segfault.
Here's an example of what would give me a segfault.

Code:

SpriteFactory* factory = new ConcreteFactory();
Sprite* test = factory->getSprite(1);
...
test->draw();

Any ideas on why this would happen?
Thanks again!

Cancel that, I know why I got a segfault.
I'm going to go put that std::map in to get rid of those repetitive if statements, thanks a bunch to everyone, you helped me a great deal