Software Engineering and Computer Games

29.5. Serializing pointers

Serializing pointer members

CPopDoc has a cGame* _pgame object as its most important member. Serializing the cGame *_pgame pointer takes a bit of care.

Something to realize is that when you load into a CPopDoc, that CPopDoc object will already exist, so it will have been initialized by a constructor call. So the _pgame will in fact be a valid pointer. Whenever you load into a valid pointer variable ptr, you have to call delete on the pointer first, otherwise you’ll have a memory leak caused by the ‘orphaned’ object that the pointer pointed to before you overwrote it with the load. For reasons we’ll now explain, we must use an overloaded ar >> ptr operator to load into a pointer, rather than a call like ptr->Serialize(ar). ...