Aminmation and other forms of Movement

Today was lessons 20 to 22 at Lazy Foo'. Animations and scrolling backgrounds. Most of my time was spent breaking out the Animation lesson and creating my own robust Sprite Object. Also I cleaned up some of the SDL wrapper functions and put them in their own header/code section.

Today's limitation was trying to create arrays of undetermined sizes of things. My pointer-fu is still weak. Right now I am still doing:

SDL_Surface* ObjList[MAXOBJECTS];

as my method of creating an array of pointers to structures. I did not have my K&R book handy so I had to settle here for now.

The concern is for my Sprite object. A Sprite Sheet may contain different sized animations of the sprite depending on the "state" of the object it is representing. For example, the animation for a standing figure may not use the same dimensions of that the same figure laying down. So right now I have to assume the same frame size for each version of the sprite.

Personally, I am not too worried about this for now. That is the one of the points of this project. Learning how to do things. Last night I stopped just before the Pointers to Structures section. So I will go over that tonight.

I have been pondering taking a few classes, but what I don't need or want is a "Programming in " course. The language syntax is rarely the problem with me. But that is most of what is offered in various "Continuing Ed" type classes. I would like to take upper division CS type classes, but I don't really care to spend a few thousand dollars a credit. I don't need the credit, just the information. Not to mention I suspect I know a good deal of the information in scattered form. So I would spend most of my time waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. So Books and the Web will be my school grounds.