Where to put manager classes

[FRex]

Hey, for example: textures manager, that holds map of strings to textures. Where to put it? It should be accesible from anywhere sf::Texture is... so.. everywhere, that's the problem. What are the options even? A static pointer of a class that also has static method GetReference()? Externs? Creating in main and passing pointer around anyone who is likely to request duplicates of already loaded texture?

[Nexus]

It should be accesible from anywhere sf::Texture is... so.. everywhere, that's the problem.

That's indeed the problem, your assumption is wrong

You don't need it everywhere. You only need it in the part of your game which is responsible for the graphics, and in particular, sf::Texture. You don't need it for physics, audio, AI, or other game logic. So you can put your manager object in a class responsible for the graphics.

[FRex]

You don't need it everywhere. You only need it in the part of your game which is responsible for the graphics, and in particular, sf::Texture. You don't need it for physics, audio, AI, or other game logic. So you can put your manager object in a class responsible for the graphics.

Well yes, it 'should be acessible from few places in which I might need same textures'. So there are few locations one of these should be placed I can think of. I'm really struggling with structuring anything nicely in oop. Apparently global singletons are bad so I'm avoiding them. Should I just let any group of classes that are likely to request same textures keep a pointer to their texture manager? Is that 'dependancy injection'?

[Nexus]

Should I just let any group of classes that are likely to request same textures keep a pointer to their texture manager?

Yes, that is a possibility.

You can also add a small abstraction layer in-between: Each texture gets an identifier (e.g. an enum or small description string). The classes that request textures then pass this ID to a higher-level class, which in turn lookups the exact resource path and returns the sf::Texture. This has the advantage that you don't need to refactor every place where textures are processed, in case something with the loading changes.

[mateandmetal]

You need to share textures between game states?

I think you can have a texture manager instance inside your game state manager class, and a public accesor, so your game states can easily access the textures ( say goodbye to evil singletons  )

Pseudo-code:

   texture = gameStateMgr.getTextureManager().getTexture("file.png")
 

[FRex]

May or may not need to share between several instances of a something(bullet, monster, whatever) so I need a way to request texture - freshly loaded or already existing from previous request and I'm considering the options.

[masskiller]

In my manager class I use a getTextureref method which receives an unsigned int to get a reference of the texture according to the number given, that way I can use the texture for whatever I want as long as I have filled the object with something. I was even thinking of adding the same functionality to operator[]. In my case I fill the manager with all images(and textures afterwards) I need beforehand and then use it as needed for either sprites or a class that uses them.