Beginning C++ Game Programming

Building the PlayableCharacter class

Now we know the basics about inheritance, polymorphism, and pure virtual functions, we will put them to use. We will build a PlayableCharacter class that has the vast majority of the functionality that any character from our game is going to need. It will have one pure virtual function, handleInput. The handleInput function will need to be quite different in the sub-classes, so this makes sense.

As PlayableCharacter will have a pure virtual function, it will be an abstract class and no objects of it will be possible. We will then build both Thomas and Bob classes, which will inherit from PlayableCharacter, implement the definition of the pure virtual function, and allow us to instantiate Bob and Thomas objects ...