new to building finite-state machines. Where do I begin?

[theprogrammer]

Hi,
I have been reading the tutorials and it shows how easy C++ really is. What I still haven't reached yet is how to make finite-state machines. I doubt that is covered and I really need to know how to do that. I have a game that is almost finished it just needs a replay button and a start menu would be nice too. I was told that is all done with finite-state machines. I am using a SDK for programmers to make iPhone apps in C++ and have them work on iPhones without jailbreaking and without owning a Macintosh.

[AbstractionAnon]

FSMs lend themselves very nicely to implementation in C++. If you understand state machines, then you know that they can be represented as a table of tuples { state, event, action, next_state } where state, event and action are distinct enum types. The context of the class instance is the current state. When an event occurs, a method is called which looks up the { current-state, event } pair. That determines the action to be executed and sets the current state of the instance to the next_state value.

FSMs are also nicely suited to implemention as a template <ST, AT, ET> where ST, AT, and ET are the typenames of the state, event and action enums respectively. This makes it easy to implement different state machines in the same program.