Question

Say I have a base class Base and it’s subclasses SubA and SubB.

public class Base(){

    public (static?) Animation anim;

    public Base(Frame[] frames){

        CpuIntensiveAnimationCreation(frames);

        // I need only one 'instance' of Animation Per subclass.
        // Every different TYPE of subclass needs it's own Animation instance.
        // A subclass can share one Animation, among multiple subclass-instances. (static?)

    }

See, I don’t want to initialize a new Animation instance for every instance of a subclass I make, since it takes quite some time. I do however need every subclass to have it’s own Animation.
I could ofcourse have a static Animation per subclass and not use a superclass, but that would require a lot of redundant/copied code.

How should I get to this?

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to have an abstract method getAnimation() in the base class.

Subclasses could then override this method to return a static Animation per subclass.