How would you solve this? (Game Engine Question)

[epicasian]

Hello Daniweb,
I am writing a game engine in C++ with SDL, and am faced with a problem. I need to store the sprite animation coordinates for every different animation in a different array. The problem I am facing is, since I am putting the arrays in one single Player class, and there will be different players with different animations and amount of animations, how would I implement this?
Is it possible to add class members dynamically? Could I load the member variables from a text file? I've been sitting at my computer for a good hour/ hour and a half trying to figure this out.

Thanks, and all help is appreciated,
~EpicAsian

[griswolf]

what you need is a collection of animation coordinate arrays. The STL is your friend here: Do you want to always iterate through all the sprites? Then use a vector. Do you want to look up sprites by name? Use a map. Each Player instance then has one collection of sprite data.

[NathanOliver]

Yes you could have them stored in a text file and then have a vector in your sprite class to hold the data. Then if you need it you can read the data from the file and store it into the vector.

[mrnutty]

Better yet, you should decouple the system. A player class should not have an array
that stores the animation sequence. Try something like this for example.

class Player{
  //blah blah blah
 void move(int x, int y){ /*logic goes here */ }
 //more blah blah blah
};

template<typename CoordType>
struct Animation{
 typename typedef std::pair<CoordType,CoordType> Coordinate;
 typename typedef std::vector<Coordinate> AnimationType;

 virtual void animate()= 0;
};


class PlayerAnimation: public Animation<float>{
private: 
 AnimationType sequenceOfMoves;
 Player thePlayer;
public:
 PlayerAnimation(const Player& player,const AnimationType& c) : thePlayer(player), sequenceOfMoves(c){};

 virutal void animate()const{
   //psuedocode here
   foreach(Coordinates coordinate in sequenceOfMoves){
       thePlayer.move(coordinate.x(), coordinate.y());
   }
 }
};
void fillPlayerMoves(const Animation::AnimationType& seq){
 /* logic to animate player goes here */
}
int main(){
 Player player;
 Animation::AnimationType listOfMoves;
 fillPlayerMoves(listOfMoves);
 Animation animation = new PlayerAnimation(player,listOfMoves);
 animation.animate();
}