I finally found a use for pointers-to-pointers! See, right now I'm working on my tile engine, and one of the classes is cTileMap, which holds an array of the number of cTiles specified in the constructor. Now, each tile has an SDL_Surface* in them (obviously I'm using SDL), and I have a pointer to an area in memory (the tile array is being allocated on the heap). Anyway, the way I HAD been doing it was specifying each tile in the tile file, and loading them into each its own variable (which is now being turned into a much faster binary file), but now I just grab a pointer to each used tile and populate the array with pointers instead of actual tiles. So in essence I'm using a **SDL_Surface. I also use ** for traversal of a 2D array, since there would be no way to specify the Y value otherwise.

I never thought I could find a use for normal pointers, let alone pointers-to-pointers. I really feel like working on these projects alone is helping me learn C++ better. I also have to thank all the GDNers who helped my on my last tile-based endeavor, for showing me how I could just use the SDL_Surface* for the tiles instead of the bitmaps themselves (which wastes lots of memory).