Question

Hey so I was working on my pong game and found it quite tedious to design a new sprite ball everytime i wanted to spawn one ase i ended up being very repetative:

sf::Image img;
    img.Create(30,50,sf::Color(255,0,0));
    mySprite box(img, sf::Vector2f(0,300), sf::Vector2f(1,1), 0, 36, 300); //TODO: make collision work at extremely high speeds
    box.SetCenter(15,25);

    sf::Image img2;
    img2.Create(56.5,80,sf::Color(255,0,0));
    mySprite box2(img2, sf::Vector2f(800,300), sf::Vector2f(1,1), 0, 239, 300);
    box2.SetCenter(25,40);

    sf::Image img3;
    img3.Create(56.5,80,sf::Color(255,0,10));
    mySprite box3(img3, sf::Vector2f(500,300), sf::Vector2f(1,1), 0, 135, 400);
    box3.SetCenter(25,40);

    sf::Image img4;
    img4.Create(56.5,80,sf::Color(255,166,90));
    mySprite box4(img4, sf::Vector2f(300,500), sf::Vector2f(1,1), 0, 10, 100);
    box4.SetCenter(25,40);

Creating a Spawn() function doesn’t work because i have to create a new name for the sprite instantiation every new sprite(thus the box,box1,box2, etc.). How can i make a function that somehow randomly formulates a name for another ball i want to spawn?

Answer 1

You can’t randomly generate variable names. How would you reference them in your code?

Why don’t you just use a vector to store your images and boxes, and then use a loop to spawn sprites:

std::vector<mySprite> boxes;

std::vector<Parameters> parameters;

for(std::vector<Parameters>::iterator it = parameters.begin(); 
    it != parameters.end(); ++it) {
    sf::Image img;
    img.Create(it->param1, it->param2, it->color);
    mySprite box(img, it->vector1, it->vector2, it->param3, it->param4, 
                 it->param5);
    box.SetCenter(it->center);
    boxes.push_back(box);
}

This assumes that you have a data-structure Parameters that can hold all the parameters you require (with better names than the ones in my example). You then loop over all the parameters-sets you have, and create sprite for each one.