Book Image

Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

By : John P. Doran, Matt Casanova
Book Image

Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

By: John P. Doran, Matt Casanova

Overview of this book

You’ve learned how to program, and you’ve probably created some simple games at some point, but now you want to build larger projects and find out how to resolve your problems. So instead of a coder, you might now want to think like a game developer or software engineer. To organize your code well, you need certain tools to do so, and that’s what this book is all about. You will learn techniques to code quickly and correctly, while ensuring your code is modular and easily understandable. To begin, we will start with the core game programming patterns, but not the usual way. We will take the use case strategy with this book. We will take an AAA standard game and show you the hurdles at multiple stages of development. Similarly, various use cases are used to showcase other patterns such as the adapter pattern, prototype pattern, flyweight pattern, and observer pattern. Lastly, we’ll go over some tips and tricks on how to refactor your code to remove common code smells and make it easier for others to work with you. By the end of the book you will be proficient in using the most popular and frequently used patterns with the best practices.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
4
Artificial Intelligence Using the State Pattern

Chapter 10. Sharing Objects with the Flyweight Pattern

We previously learned about object pools in Chapter 7, Improving Performance with Object Pools, and that they are great for avoiding slowdowns in our game due to dynamic memory allocation. But, there are still other steps that we can take to reduce the amount of memory that we use to begin with.

When creating projects, you'll often run into times where you want to have many objects on the screen at once. While computers have become much more powerful over the past few years, they still can't handle thousands of complex game objects on the screen by themselves.

In order to accomplish this feat, programmers need to think of ways to lighten the memory load on their program. Using the Flyweight pattern, we abstract the common parts of our object and share them with only the data that's unique to each instance (such as position and current health) being created.