Practical GameStateManager

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desrik
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Practical GameStateManager

Post by desrik »

First I must say that yes I have done my research on this subject. I have read countless articles on state management. What I am trying to do is avoid using the singleton pattern for my game states in order to preserve the ability to have two states running at the same time. ( ex. Having a menu open while the game continues to run in the background ) Normally, I would create each state as a singleton and have the main engine class manage said states. Here is where I run into problems. One is the singleton issue stated previously. The other is that with the engine class managing the game states, in order to change states I must pass the changeState function two parameters, one that identifies the desired state and another which is a pointer to the engine class, thus needing the engine class to be a singleton. ( Say the IntroState state is currently running and I wish to change to the MenuState. If the state is not a singleton then the call would be changeState( Engine::getSingleton(), MenuState ) due to the engine class having to be a singleton in order to be accessable from IntroState ( Which I would like to prevent for encapsulation reasons ). Or with the state being a singleton, the call would be changeState( MenuState::getInstance() ). Either way one of them must be a singleton. I would much rather have a singleton StateManager class. )
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Thyrion
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Re: Practical GameStateManager

Post by Thyrion »

"eXpl0it3r" from the sfml team made a nice simple state machine example:
https://github.com/eXpl0it3r/SmallGameEngine

no need for singletons.
desrik
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Joined: Fri Apr 08, 2011 10:40 pm

Re: Practical GameStateManager

Post by desrik »

Perfect :) Thank you!
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