Sometimes I forget why ICE is the coolest engine ever. I was working with another engine and this happened:
Object3D* some_object;
delete some_object;
and then of course it immediately crashes somewhere because of some stupid container still containing the pointer:
std::vector<Object3D*> mSomeContainer;
Fair enough, vanilla stuff. Still, it’s been years since I last saw such a primitive crash in ICE. Because my non-STL, non-standard-compliant, “ugly” containers are still smart enough to remove the dead pointers from themselves, automatically! Hell, I even forgot I had that feature. It’s been the backbone of the whole engine, for about 9 years now… I can savagely delete any “managed” object anywhere anytime, and the underlying kernel just fixes up whatever needs fixing.
STL, meh! The industry couldn’t even standardize matrix conventions between D3D and GL, everybody has to re-learn the company’s custom, in-house matrices / points / quaternions / whatever anyway. Maybe they should standardize this instead of somewhat trivial containers.