Lately I've been trying to separate graphics from logic on my game and so far things are looking good. One thing I am not sure how I should deal with is storing animation states and accessing them using a command system. How I am going about animations is that I have an Animation class that stores sf::IntRects which I use on the renderer to choose the correct part of the needed texture. In the beginning I thought that having an animation object as an attribute of the entity class would be ok since it's just a state and it doesn't contain actual graphical information. Something like this:
class Entity
{
public:
Entity(sf::Vector2f, float);
virtual ~Entity() = 0;
void setPosition(sf::Vector2f);
void setPosition(int, int);
void move(sf::Vector2f);
void move(int, int);
sf::Vector2f getPosition() const;
void setVelocity(sf::Vector2f);
void setVelocity(int, int);
void accelerate(sf::Vector2f);
void accelerate(int, int);
sf::Vector2f getVelocity() const;
void setRotation(float);
void rotate(sf::Vector2f);
void rotate(float);
float getRotation() const;
Animation& getAnimationState() const;
void update(float);
private:
Animation mAnimation;
sf::Vector2f mPosition;
sf::Vector2f mVelocity;
float mRotation;
};
This is how the basic drawEntity function works (it's the base for more specific drawing functions providing the texture files) :
void Renderer::DrawEntity(const Entity& entity, const char* file)
{
sf::Texture& texture = mResourceManager.getTexture(file);
texture.isSmooth();
sf::Sprite sprite;
sprite.setTexture(texture);
sprite.setTextureRect(entity.getAnimationState().getCurrentFrame());
sprite.setPosition(entity.Position);
sprite.setRotation(entity.Rotation);
mRenderWindow.draw(sprite);
}
Technically, storing an animation object to the entity class makes sense since it simply holds a state, however after exchanging some messages with Nexus I am having doubts whether I should store the actual animation object or use the pimpl idiom and store a pointer to it. Another option is to store the animation objects in a separate map but that probably complicate things.
Is the above an acceptable design and if not, how should I proceed ?
Any feedback is much appreciated!
