Software Engineering and Computer Games

9.2. The cSprite class

Now let’s look at what goes inside a cSprite. A sprite does not need to know the name of its owner cCritter. This is the way it should be, as a sprite is simply some geometry in space, possibly textured with a bitmap. This makes life easier as maintaining a cCritter * pointer inside cSprite while maintaining an ‘inverse’ cSprite * pointer inside cCritter would be a bit of a hassle, particularly when it came to writing the destructors for these objects.

A sprite is something that a critter uses to draw a picture of itself. We will think of the size of a critter as being the visual size of its sprite. So a sprite will have a Real _radius field. Our decision was to have the _radius belong to the sprite rather than the critter, ...