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 7. Improving Performance with Object Pools

In programming languages, one of the most time-consuming things for the computer to do is deal with memory allocation. It's fairly inefficient and, depending on the resources being used, could slow down your game drastically.

A common element found in shooter games, or any game with explosions or bullets, is to create and destroy many objects in quick succession. Take, for example, the Touhou Project series of games, where there are many bullets being fired by both the player and enemies. When done in the simplest manner, calling new when you want to create a bullet and delete when you want to remove it will cause our game to lag or freeze over time.

To prevent this from happening, we can make use of the Object Pool pattern.