SFML Game Development By Example

Automated resource management

Let's talk about textures and the way we've been using them so far. A texture in SFML is something you want to only have one of, since it's not cheap memory wise. Our approach so far was simply storing the textures as data members of relevant classes. A scenario that illustrates how horrendous this strategy is would be as follows: you need the same texture somewhere else. That's it. It really doesn't seem like the type of thing that you could just brush off your shoulders, as it only happens once in a blue moon. Creating multiple textures that all hold the same data is a huge waste of resources, and adding methods for obtaining textures from the classes that use them is a disaster. Not only does it clutter the class ...