static object

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Original post by bartiss How do you do this? And am I right to try it?

Many will tell you that singletons are nothing more than 'glorified globals', and should be avoided in most (perhaps all) cases. They can solve the problem of initialization order (or not, depending on how you implement them), but otherwise they have many of the same drawbacks as globals (strong coupling, excessive dependencies, etc.). Some even go so far as to call the singleton an antipattern.

A good question to ask yourself is, who really needs to know about (and have access to) the sound system? When an object is available as a singleton, it becomes all too easy to just grab the instance and do things 'where it's convenient' rather than where it 'should be done'. For example, game objects end up playing sounds directly via the manager rather than, say, sending a message that a sound should be played.

I'm not saying these problems are easy to solve, because they aren't! Also, I'm no software engineer, so take the above with a grain of salt. In any case, I'd recommend taking the AP's advice and doing a search on the term 'singleton', as there are many articles and forum threads on the topic to be found online.

Thanks! I think I'll just carry on with the global pointer ;-)

I would recommend reading up on them regardless, and trying them out for yourself. A little extra knowledge never hurts, and if you're planning on working professionally in the game industry, they *are* used at many studios. So even if you don't like them, or they don't work for you in this instance, at least you will know how they work, and what problem they solve.

Bottom-line is if you try it, and find you don't like it -- don't use it.

Cheers.

Ideally, since the App creates a cSoundSystem, it should not be global. Making it global allows the possibility of accessing it before it has been created.¹ The App should pass a reference to any class it controls that might need to access the cSoundSystem. Classes external to the App would access the cSoundSystem through the App or query the App for a reference to the cSoundSystem.

In practical terms, such a system is can be very inconvenient. It results in lots of parameters and pointers, leading people to use globals -- giving up some correctness, robustness, and maintainability for the sake of convenience.

¹ Singleton prevents this, but that feature is usually overlooked.