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

Learning and understand the uses of the const keyword


Using const is another area of programming that seems to be a little controversial. Some programmers argue that they have never had a bug where using const would have helped. Others feel that, since you can't guarantee that a const object won't be modified, it is completely worthless. The fact is that const objects can be modified. const is not magic. So, is const correctness still a good thing? Before we get into that, let's have a look at what const is.

When you create a const variable, you must initialize it. All const variables will be checked at compile time to make sure that the variable is never assigned a new value. Since it happens at compile time, it doesn't have an influence on the performance. These are a few benefits that we should consider. First, it improves readability. By marking a variable as const, you are letting the reader know that this variable is not supposed to change. You are sharing your intent about the variable...