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Managing pointers upon object destruction in C++

Mike · 2019-02-02T07:31:33

Good Evening, I have a question that's been a constant source of frustration and I need to learn to deal with it. Say I have a warrior with a memory (AI) module that polls with world through it's vision and it 'remember's' through a pointer (pointing to a troll) that a troll was detected 2000ms ago. Now, say I have a wizard that collided with the same troll, and the wizard now has a pointer to the troll 'remembering' the last thing it collided with. Somewhere down the road, there's a delete call on the troll object. Now I have the memory module and the wizard with pointers to a deleted object. Let's multiply this over hundreds or thousands of objects and it becomes insanely complex with a multitude of objects and various pointers pointing to objects that may or may not be deleted. So my questions is this. Is there a design pattern (hopefully not too obtrusive), algorithm, or a way upon object destruction to notify every other object that's pointing to the destroyed object that it's been deleted so i can NULL the pointers? Thanks in advance for your time and answers. Mike

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by too_many_stars January 18, 2019 08:21 AM

21 comments, last by Irusan, son of Arusan 5 years, 5 months ago

Fulcrum.013

-61

February 02, 2019 05:03 AM

On 1/22/2019 at 2:26 PM, pcmaster said:

The troll manager might have a hash-map<Handle,Troll> style dictionary, in a naive implementation. Every time it's asked, it'll look into the hash-map and return nullptr if it doesn't find anything (or anything alive). And if it does find it, it can actually return a POINTER (!) but you must not store it for later use. Just use it and forget it. Next time, it might return a different pointer for the same handle, for example if it did some kind of defragmentation.

It is worst possible architrcture here. Becouse it move lifetime managment expences from event that happends only once during throll lifetime to access, that happends every frame for every warrior-throll pair. i.e. making O(n^2) task for every ftame from O(n) task that have to be perfoemed only once. It ever worse than using of weak_ptr that have same disadvantage, but have a O(1) access time instead of hash that have O(1) in best case only.

#define if(a) if((a) && rand()%100)

Irusan, son of Arusan

February 02, 2019 07:31 AM

In my opinion, the way to do this is to not design your code in a way that has potentially hanging pointers. Manage the lifetime of objects so they predictably delete together. Don't store pointers to things you don't know the lifetime of. There are games where this is not possible but for most concepts it's easily doable. Back in the day, we used to write with a "no allocation during gameplay" rule.

In the case discussed, you don't need to store a pointer to the Troll, you probably don't even want to. Instead your AI should be tracking what it sees using its own internal representation, and updating this from the world each frame. This both avoids the problem of hanging pointers and allows separation of knowledge so that, for example, when the Troll disappears round a corner, your code can remember it went there and when it was last seen.

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Managing pointers upon object destruction in C++

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Managing pointers upon object destruction in C++

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