For the past 2 days I have been making a small 2D space invaders type game, very inefficient but what do you expect in 2 days My problem is this, I have around 70 variables (from things like moving the ship, moving the enemy, bullets etc) and when you fail and it says GameOver I want it to restart but I need to reset all my variables. Is there any way to delete a variable so I can then define it again ie: Delete Variable[5]; int Variable[5]; The reason I want to do this is because its easier to define an array and everything is automatically set to zero rather than having to set up a loop to set each array element back to zero. Thanks

memset() can be used to do this, search the web to find out how!

quote:

---

Original post by Anonymous Poster
memset() can be used to do this, search the web to find out how!

---

Come on! You could have given him a perfunctory explanation at least!

memset() can be used to set the contents of a segment of memory, such as an array, to a specific value:

memset( array, value, size_of_array );  

As for actually deleting and redeclaring arrays, it can't be done with static arrays (e.g. int array[5]; ), but it can with dynamic arrays

int *array; // array is a pointer to a location in memoryarray = new int[5]; // array now points to a 5 element arrayfor( int i = 0; i < 5; i++ ) // iterate through elements array[i] = i; // set each element to indexdelete array; // deallocate the memory. array now points to an // undefined value. DO NOT USE IT!

This is a fairly simplistic discussion. Look in your development environment's help files or on the web for more information. Hope this has helped.

EDIT: Damn smileys!

Edited by - Oluseyi on September 18, 2001 2:31:18 PM

In C/C++, you can use malloc and realloc


array=malloc(size); // allocates memory for "array", with size of "size"
realloc(array, size) // reallocates memory for "array", with new size of "size"

Hi

Just a suggestion.

Have a function to initialise your variables. When ''game over'' occurs have a function to flatten them again - then recycle back to your function for initialising variables etc.

eg.
//declare variable
int *nVariable;
int nNumberOfVariables;
//then initialise them in suitable function
nVariable=0; /*setting pointer to ''NULL'' makes it easy to test*/
nNumberOfVariables=5; /* or however many you need*/
//ensure memory not already allocated for this
if (!nVariable)
{
/*dynamically allocate memory for 5 (ie ''nNumberOfVariables'') integers*/
nVariable=new int[nNumberOfVariables];
/*you can use your favourite function to ''zero'' the array; memset is good, ZeroMemory is ok in windows*/
ZeroMemory(nVariable,sizeof(int)*nNumberOfVariables);
}
//
//then just put in whatever values you want
//
//Once you''re finished, call your ''variable kill function'':
/*make sure nVariable is valid as trying to delete it when it''s not is Very Bad*/
if (nVariable)
{
delete[] nVariable; /* note delete[] signifies array to be deleted*/
nVariable=0;
//
Then just call ''initialisation'' function again to reset everything.

Most of this is a lot easier with c++: if you just have a class for the game itself then when that class goes out of scope or is deleted then restarting the game is simply a matter of instantiating another class of that type.

Hope that is of some use to you.

I use malloc/free to make an array of pointers so that I can use realloc later and resize an array if I need to. then I can fill up the array with pointers to object that I can get from new. (malloc doesn''t clear the memory, though)

Cheers for the help guys