Hi all, I''m a beginner with C/C++ and when I came across pointers and dereferencing stuff, I could understand how it worked...what I don''t understand (and what isn''t explained) is when and why we use pointers? Thanks.

we use pointers because it is much easier on your memory when you simply point to a memory location about a sizeof( LONG ) (depending) big, than to pass all the data to a function say.

Say you have model verts stored in an array.
And you wanna pass it to a function for level of detail calculation or whatever.. something that needs to edit the verts.

It makes a lot more sense to pass a pointer to the location of that block of memory.. than to create another block, an exact replica of, the original verts and give those to the function for processing.

Is that clear at all? Hope this helps,
Andy

Yes thank you, I have a reasonable idea now hehe, thanks! :D