How to implement a stack of game states in C++

Posted by Lisandro Vaccaro on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Lisandro Vaccaro
Published on 2013-10-08T16:08:36Z Indexed on 2013/11/08 10:22 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 362

Filed under:
|

I'm new to C++ and as a college proyect I'm building a 2D platformer with some classmates, I recently read that it's a good idea to have a stack of gamestates instead of a single global variable with the game state (which is what I have now) but I'm not sure how to do it.

Currently this is my implementation:

class GameState
{
    public:
        virtual ~GameState(){};
        virtual void handle_events() = 0;
        virtual void logic() = 0;
        virtual void render() = 0;
};

class Menu : public GameState
{
    public:
        Menu();
        ~Menu();
        void handle_events();
        void logic();
        void render();
};

Then I have a global variable of type GameState:

GameState *currentState = NULL;

And in my Main I define the currentState and call it's methods:

int main(){
    currentState = new Menu();
    currentState.handle_events();
}

How can I implement a stack or something similar to go from that to something like this:

int main(){
    statesStack.push(new Menu());
    statesStack.getTop().handle_events();
}

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about c++

Related posts about game-state