CLASS vs. OBJECT and memory management

[Ñuño Martínez]

IMO, with what you're trying to achieve, it would actually be simpler to just use records and have a "spriteType" field there. You can use the Case() statement to test for the type and call the appropriate procedure when needed. It may not look the prettiest, but it's the simplest way and there's no risk that compiler optimisations mess something up.
Also, you can have a SPRITETYPE_NONE value for your spriteType, which gives you a way to have "NULL" array members for free.

This is much like how Build works, and I think I'll go this way.

Also, have you tried using a profiler? It may turn out that the memory accesses aren't really that much of a problem and you're trying to optimize the wrong thing.

No, I didn't. I tried to use GNU's profiler a long time ago (+5 years) and it didn't work too much as it couldn't identify several Object Pascal stuff. It was useless. I should try again, may be FPC 3.0 works. [edit] I've just read at the Lazarus wiki that "Support for using gprof under Linux is broken in FPC 2.2.0-2.4.0; it is fixed in FPC 2.6+", which explains why it didn't work.

Perhaps it would be more understandable if I create a mind graph representation of the concept

That would be great because I'm a bit lost.

[Thyandyr]

Can I read this thread as allegory to Object vs Record (with methods)

[Ñuño Martínez]

Of course you can.

By the way, I've discovered "records with methods" recently. May be they are a better approach for what I want/need as they don't need initialization/constructor and no inheritance is involved (AFAIK FPC OBJECT inherits from an internal TObject the same way CLASS does, doesn't it?).

[Akira13]

You definitely should use records, with the {$modeswitch AdvancedRecords} define set. The classic Turbo Pascal style "objects" are well known to be buggy (memory leaks, e.t.c.) and as far as I know they aren't being actively maintained or developled in either Delphi or FPC, and I see no reason why they ever would be again in the future.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Yep.

Actually I think I'll use what SilverWarior suggested: a CLASS containing all sprite information as an ARRAY of RECORDs.

[turrican]

Yep! What about TObjectList and TDictionary ?

[Ñuño Martínez]

AFAIK both TObjectList and TDictionary are dynamic and designed for easy insertion and deletion. That is slow.

The best demonstrable game performance were data-pools, where no dynamic memory management is done: just activate and de-activate static memory.