Question

I am working on a game that has monsters and dragons. Dragons can do everything monsters can do except they can also breathe fire.

I have made a class of type ‘monster’ and a class that inherits from monster called ‘dragon’.

I then have a class called ‘monsters’ which has as a private member vector which will contain dragon and monster elements.

In the main game loop I need to cycle through the vector and blow fire if the current element is a dragon, and do nothing if it is just a monster.

I have tried using typeid() but it always returns monster* whether the current element is a plain monster or a dragon.

Is there any way to do this or does it not make sense to even use inheritance in this case?
Would it make more sense for the dragon class to not inherit, and to instead stand by itself independent of monster?

Any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

You could do something like this.

class Monster {};
class Dragon : public Monster
{
  public:
    void BlowFire() {}
}

std::vector<Monster*> monsters; // Collection of monsters

for(auto it = monsters.begin(); it != monsters.end(); ++it)
{
    Dragon* pDragon = dynamic_cast<Dragon*>(*it); // Attempt to convert pointer
    if(pDragon)
    {
       pDragon->BlowFire(); // If it is indeed a Dragon, blow fire.
    }
}

But it sounds like you should arrange your classes a little better. Why don’t you just have all your monster classes have an Attack method? This way you can override the methods for each different monster type.

class Monster 
{
  public:
    virtual void Attack() {} // All monsters can attack
};

class Dragon : public Monster
{
  public:
    virtual void Attack() { // Do something special for a Dragon. }      
};

Monster myMonster;
Dragon myDragon;
myMonster.Attack(); // Generic monster attack.
myDragon.Attack(); // Special super dragon fire attack!