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

Introduction to monitor refresh rates


These days, flat screen Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitors are very common. However, to understand refresh rates and double buffering, we need to understand how older monitors display an image. Along the way, we will learn about common graphics terms, such as pixels and screen resolution:

Figure 11.1 - Simplified cathode ray tube diagram

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors contain screens with millions of tiny red, green, and blue phosphor dots. These dots glow for a short time when struck by an electron beam that travels across the screen to create an image. The cathode is a heated filament inside a vacuum sealed glass tube. The ray is a stream of electrons generated by an electron gun, which is directed by magnetic deflection plates. By adjusting the magnetic field of the plates, the electron beam can be moved around and adjusted to strike every part of the screen.

The screen is coated with phosphor, an organic material that glows for a short time when...