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

Summary


We have really covered a lot in this chapter. Now, you know more about how computer monitors work than you probably ever wanted. In this chapter, we dived into the nitty gritty details of framebuffers and how pixels are colored on screen. We saw that having a frame rate that was out-of-sync with the monitor can cause tearing. We also looked at how double buffering and using VSync can fix this problem. Unfortunately, we also saw that VSync can cause problems of its own. We also looked at triple buffering and saw the pros and cons there. In the end, there is no perfect answer. There will always be some trade-off. You must either accept tearing or the possibility of a drastic drop in frame rate due to VSync.

Finally, we finished this chapter by looking at how our frame rate affects the rest of our gameplay code. Specifically, we looked at physics and animation, and learned that we must use time-based physics and animation for a more consistent look and feel in our game.

In the next chapter...