Hey guys. New SDL user here. I’m working on a project, and I want to move the initializations to a separate CPP file than my game loop. It started out pretty good, I was able to move the SDL_Init function, the TTF_Init function, and the Surface creation to another cpp file, and declare them extern in the header. That worked fine. But when I move this function:
// In the header file:
extern TTF_Font* Font
// TTF_Font initialized globally in the 2nd CPP file:
TTF_Font* Font = TTF_OpenFont("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf", 42);
// inside of a function inside the 2nd CPP file:
if (!Font)
{
std::cerr << "TTF_OpenFont() Failed: " << TTF_GetError();
TTF_Quit();
SDL_Quit();
return 1;
}
TTF_OpenFont failed is the error I get. I’ve been going nuts trying to figure out why. It works fine when that code is in main.cpp, so it’s not permission or filepath issue.
Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.
It’s hard to tell with this limited sample of code, but there are things to be careful about here.
Depending on global variable initialization order is a bad idea. You’d have to dig through the standard to figure it out, but to be safe, you should initialize your globals to a constant, e.g. nullptr for pointers. In your main(), you can explicitly control initialization order. You’ll want to initialize both SDL and SDL_ttf before the call to TTF_OpenFont().
Thanks man.
You were right. It was the the global definition/initialization that was screwing it up.
I instead declared it globally in the 2nd cpp file, and defined it inside of a function in the 2nd cpp file, which was called from the main function:
// In the header file:
extern TTF_Font* Font
// TTF_Font declared globally in the 2nd CPP file:
TTF_Font* Font;
// inside of a function inside the 2nd CPP file:
TTF_Font* Font = TTF_OpenFont("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf", 42);
if (!Font)
{
std::cerr << "TTF_OpenFont() Failed: " << TTF_GetError();
TTF_Quit();
SDL_Quit();
return 1;
}