SDL Application problems

[hnefatl]

Hi again,

My SDL Application, when run, seems to work OK, but it never actually appears. My IDE (Code::Blocks) says it's running, and it appears as a running process in Task Manager, but it doesn't appear (neither does it modify a file, as it is supposed to during its run, but that's irrelevant).

I believe the problem may be this:
SDL_Surface *man[12];
Not only am I unsure how to initialize the entire vector to NULL, but I remember reading that arrays of pointers are "bad" somewhere...

I later set their values by using a for loop that gives them each a path to a file, like this:

    int x=0;
    std::stringstream ss;
    char path[30];
    std::string partialPath="resources/sprites/man/";
    for (x=0; x<12; x++) {
        ss<<partialPath<<"man"<<(x+1)<<".png";
        ss>>path;
        man[x]=IMG_Load(path);
        ss.clear();
    }

    for (x=0; x<12; x++) {
        if (man[x]==NULL) {
            return false;
        }
    }

This seemed the most space efficient method of doing it: feeding an std::stringstream the path in segments, then using that path to load the image.

Is there anything wrong with this?

If so, how do I rectify my error?

Thanks,
hnefatl

[hnefatl]

Oops, seems when i declared path to be 30 chars long (I chose 30 as a random number that I guessed would be enough spaces to fit the path), the path size was actually 30 or 31 chars long. What are the chances?

Just checking it works now.

hnefatl

[hnefatl]

Yup, it works. Sorry to bother you all!

Thanks,
hnefatl

[Disch]

You should avoid char arrays. And actually, there is no need to extract the string from a stringstream with the >> operator. The 'str' function is for just that.

You could do this without the extra char array and possibly without any memory copies with this:

    for (x=0; x<12; x++) {
        ss<<partialPath<<"man"<<(x+1)<<".png";
        man[x]=IMG_Load( ss.str().c_str() );
        ss.clear();
    }

[hnefatl]

I do try to avoid them, but IMG_Load() only takes char*, so I can't feed it a string...

Thanks, I'd forgotten about the str() and c_str() functions.

Thanks,
hnefatl