Original Post
This is something I have never tried before. My game engine is based around events. The main event class of my event system is the EventDispatcher. The EventDispatcher is responsible for making sure all the event subscribers get notified when an event is raised. It has a list of all subscribers, for each event type. I use this data structure: . Then I realized that this wouldn't work because my EventDispatcher is allocated on the stack, but shared_ptr is used to make sure that heap memory gets deallocated, so there'd probably be some runtime crash or assert or something. So then I decided to use naked pointers, that is, EventDispatcher*. This would work fine, but since there should never be a null EventDispatcher and it should never accidentally be deleted, I thought that I could maybe give each class an EventDispatcher& instead, like this:
typedef std::list <EventHandler&> EventHandlerList;
typedef std::map <std::string, EventHandlerList> EventHandlerMap;
class VideoSystem {
private:
const EventDispatcher& dispatcher;
public:
VideoSystem(const EventDispatcher& dispatcher) : dispatcher(dispatcher) {
dispatcher.RaiseEvent(VideoSystemCreatedEvent());
}
};
class Game {
private:
VideoSystem video;
EventDispatcher dispatcher;
public:
Game() : video(dispatcher) {
// whatever
}
};
