Accessing pointers inside objects

Question

I have an object called cube and I have a vector of vertices within it. Within my main DX11 project I'm making D3D11_SUBRESOURCE_DATA in order to create a vertex buffer. When I create a subresource I need to reference the vector like so:

subresourcedata.pSysMem = &vertices;

But now that the vertices are in an object I'm not sure how to do that (cube.vertices isn't the same), does the object have to be a pointer so I can use -> instead of . to reference them or is there a simple way to do what I'm doing using normal objects?

Thanks

Answer 1

Just add an accessor to your class to expose the vertices as a pointer. So, assuming you have a Vertex structure, something like:

class CMyCube
{
    // ... blah blah

public:
    const Vertex* GetVertices() const { return &m_pVertices[0]; }

    // ... blah blah

private:
    std::vector<Vertex> m_pVertices;
};

Then you can do:

pSubResource.pSysMem = pSomeCubeInstance.GetVertices();

Answer 2

You could overload the & operator.

class cube
{
public:
    vertices* operator&() const { return &_vertices[0]; }

    std::vector<vertices> _vertices;
};

Then you can do this:

cube c;

subresourcedata.pSysMem = &c;