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

The Command pattern explained


The Command pattern is exactly the pattern that solves our problem. The purpose of the Command pattern is to decouple the requester of an action from the object that performs the action. That is exactly the problem we have. Our requester is the button, and it needs to be decoupled from whatever specific function call will be made. The Command pattern takes our concept of a function pointer and wraps it into a class with a simple interface for performing the function call. However, this pattern allows us more flexibility. We will easily be able to encapsulate function pointers with multiple parameters, as well as with C++ object and member functions. Let's start off easy with just two simple functions that have the same parameter count and return type:

int Square(int x) 
{ 
  return x * x; 
} 

int Cube(int x) 
{ 
  return x*x*x; 
} 

The Command pattern encapsulates a request into an object, and it gives a common interface to perform that request. In our example...