My progress on the C++ asteroids game took a little detour down a one way street. The problem I hit was until then I thought I was being clever by passing in a reference to another class in the constructor. That worked fine until I started implementing array classes.

The issue I got was using my constructor meant that the default constructor was deleted. This happens in any class where you add your own constructor as all the special functions are deleted. You then have to add your own Move or Copy assignments if you are doing things that invoke them. Like iterating through an array (or vector in my case). Although I use Bullet and Asteroid classes, I manage  collections of them through an Asteroids and a Bullets class.

Plus I’d decided that vector class wasn’t perhaps the best class to use. This thing runs at 60 fps, so adding and deleting elements from a vector seems a bit wasteful. Instead by using a std::array, and constructing all elements in it when the managing class is instantiated, all I have to do is scan for the first element with an active flag set false. (all are set false when constructed), set a few fields for velocity and position and there it is on screen.

Is this premature optimisation? I don’t think so. One of the things that programmers are told NOT to do!

So I have cleaned up my constructors now. They are parameterless and no special functions are deleted. It’s this kind of stuff that can do your head in and one of the reasons why I think C++ is considered a harder language to master.  I’m certainly a long long way from that.

The maze? Just a metaphor for C++ programming!