I don't know what's making your program crash, but the fact that you have two uses of `new' and none of `delete' in that code doesn't make me very confident that you know what you are doing with memory management.

I very rarely use `new' myself. I prefer to use objects on the stack (`GameEngine g;' instead of `GameEngine * g = new GameEngine();', and similarly for your `Image i'). I also use standard-library containers, which handle dynamic memory allocation and release for me. In situations where I want polymorphic behavior, I make a factory function that returns a shared_ptr to the base class, so I can be sure that the object will be destroyed and its memory deleted when nobody is using it anymore.

Chances are you would have fewer unexplained crashes if you were to adhere to similar guidelines.

He is talking about the Standard Template Library (Link).

In this case, you don't do anything that would require these things however he does make a good point that if you allocate 'GameEngine' and 'Image' on the stack it will be freed for you.

Like so:

GameEngine g;
Image i(false, "pong_player.bmp");

Also, he made a point that you don't delete the objects you new.

Like so:

int main(int argc, char * args[])
{
GameEngine * g = new GameEngine();
Image * i = new Image(false, "pong_player.bmp");
g -> createSprite(i, 0, 0);

bool quit = false;

while(quit == false)
{
//Update screen and rect
g -> update();
g -> updateRect();

//Go through the events and check to see if the game should exit or react to a keypress
quit = g -> eventLoop();

//Controll the framerate
g -> checkFPS();
}

g -> exit();

delete g; <-----
delete i; <-----

return 0;
}