Thanks, that is working nicely.

Out of curiosity, more than anything else, is there a way of designing my class heirachy so that the function can return any derived class pointer, and not slice it?

Thanks! - That appears to work (VS isn't complaining.) - So even though the function returns the type cEntity*, the fact that I casted it to the appropriate type will mean that the object was not in fact sliced?

That appears to work (VS isn't complaining.) - So even though the function returns the type cEntity*, the fact that I casted it to the appropriate type will mean that the object was not in fact sliced?