I'm making a game. I need to maintain a bunch of objects, in this
case animations (explosions and stuff). I've decided to use an STL
vector. From my understanding, I need to declare it as
vector<Animation*> so that I can insert new animations with something
like myAnimations.push_back(new Animation(...)); So that's all fine
and dandy, but what I can't decide on is how to delete this animation
after it's done playing (the explosion should be deleted and removed
from the vector when it's done cycling through all it's frames). I've
been told it's a bad idea to get an object to delete itself, because
then the caller won't know whether or not it still exists, and it's
just a bad design decision. So, would it be best to have some sort of
boolean in my animation object that says something like
"animationComplete", and when set to true the iterator would then
remove it? If so, what would my iterator look like?
for( vector<Animation*>::iterator current = myAnimations.begin();
current != myAnimations.end(); current++ )
{
(*current)->step(); // tells the animation to change frames
and do whatever it needs to do
if( (*current)->animationComplete )
{
current = projectile.erase(current);
delete (*current); // <-- is this right?
continue;
}
(*current)->draw(); // draw it
}
Code looks kind of ugly... is that really the best way of doing it?