well like you said animations might need drawing and tht other thing i mentioned is movement interpolation. Lets say an enemy moves very quickly, lets say it has a speed of 10 so each update loop it moves 10 spaces in one direction. Because of this leap in position the movement will look very choppy, but if we redraw as often as we can we can draw the enemy at positions in between its start and end position from one update to the next, and make the movement look much more smooth. But sorry for calling you out in the first place as it was me who missed your sleep call =P for a simple game with no animations your loop will work fine
Yes, its just a super simple example on what a game loop should include. Sorry, I didn't see your post about movement interpolation. That would certainly be a valid situation to render more than you update.
Could you please post some code then? I'd like to see how you do it because my methods aren't the best, hehe. I won't have time to update the article for a while though.
I'm sure mine aren't either. Here is my code - it was written recently so there may still be a few bugs in it. Also, feel free to let me know if you think it's too long for this thread - in that case I could just put the class declaration.
/***************************************************************
ResourceManagerB.hpp - Generic template resource manager
(C) Alexander Thorne (SFML Coder) 2011
http://sfmlcoder.wordpress.com/
Manages loading and unloading of a resource type specified by a
template argument.
****************************************************************/
#pragma once
#ifndef AVS_ICANOS_SYSTEM_RESOURCEMANAGERB_HPP
#define AVS_ICANOS_SYSTEM_RESOURCEMANAGERB_HPP
#include <map>
#include <string>
#include <exception>
typedefconst std::string URI;
// exceptions
namespace Exceptions {
// thrown if user requests a resource URI not present in the manager's list
class URINotFound : public std::runtime_error
{
public:
URINotFound(const std::string& Message = "The specified URI was not found in the resource index.")
: runtime_error(Message) { }
};
// thrown if a resource allocation fails
class BadResourceAllocation : public std::runtime_error {
public:
BadResourceAllocation(const std::string& Message = "Failed to allocate memory for resource.")
: runtime_error(Message) {}
};
}
template <class Resource> class ResourceManagerB {
typedef std::pair<URI, Resource*> ResourcePair;
typedef std::map<URI, Resource*> ResourceList;
// the list of the manager's resources
ResourceList Resources;
public:
~ResourceManagerB() { UnloadAll(); }
// Load a resource with the specified URI
// the URI could represent, e.g, a filename
URI& Load(URI& Uri);
// unload a resource with the specified URI
void Unload(URI& Uri);
// unload all resources
void UnloadAll();
// get a pointer to a resource
Resource* GetPtr(URI& Uri);
// get a reference to a resource
Resource& Get(URI& Uri);
};
template <class Resource>
URI& ResourceManagerB<Resource>::Load(URI& Uri)
{
// check if resource URI is already in list
// and if it is, we do no more
if (Resources.find(Uri) == Resources.end())
{
// try to allocate the resource
// NB: if the Resource template argument does not have a
// constructor accepting a const std::std::string, then this
// line will cause a compiler error
Resource* temp = new (std::nothrow) Resource(Uri);
// check if the resource failed to be allocated
// std::nothrow means that if allocation failed
// temp will be 0
if (!temp)
throw Exceptions::BadResourceAllocation();
// add the resource and it's URI to the manager's list
Resources.insert(ResourcePair(Uri, temp));
}
return Uri;
}
template <class Resource>
void ResourceManagerB<Resource>::Unload(URI& Uri)
{
// try to find the specified URI in the list
ResourceList::const_iterator itr = Resources.find(Uri);
// if it is found...
if (itr != Resources.end())
{
// ... deallocate it
delete itr->second;
// then remove it from the list
Resources.erase(Uri);
}
}
template <class Resource>
void ResourceManagerB<Resource>::UnloadAll()
{
// iterate through every element of the resource list
ResourceList::iterator itr;
for (itr = Resources.begin(); itr != Resources.end(); itr++)
// delete each resource
delete itr->second;
// finally, clear the list
Resources.clear();
}
template <class Resource>
Resource* ResourceManagerB<Resource>::GetPtr(URI& Uri)
{
// find the specified URI in the list
ResourceList::const_iterator itr;
// if it is there...
if ((itr = Resources.find(Uri)) != Resources.end())
// ... return a pointer to the corresponding resource
return itr->second;
// ... else return 0
return 0;
}
template <class Resource>
Resource& ResourceManagerB<Resource>::Get(URI& Uri)
{
// get a pointer to the resource
Resource* temp = GetPtr(Uri);
// if the resource was found...
if (temp)
// ... dereference the pointer to return a reference
// to the resource
return *temp;
else
// ... else throw an exception to notify the caller that
// the resource was not found
throw Exceptions::URINotFound();
}
#endif
We could do with a forum section for "draft articles". That way people could pool ideas and code and then it could be assembled into a coherent article at the end.
Of course we could just make draft articles in the articles section, but it would make rather a mess...
We used to have a section for "proper" articles outside of the forum. In that section you could post much longer articles and people couldn't comment on them (unless they sent you a PM), and you could use HTML tags. I don't know why, but now it is gone and the link just redirects to the forum one. There were some good articles there... :(
