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

What is a Singleton?


The Singleton pattern in a nutshell is where you have a class that you can access anywhere within your project, due to the fact that only one object (instance) of that class is created (instantiated). The pattern provides a way for programmers to give access to a class's information globally by creating a single instance of an object in your game.

Whereas there are quite a few issues with using global variables, you can think of a Singleton as an improved global variable due to the fact that you cannot create more than one. With this in mind, the Singleton pattern is an attractive choice for classes that only have a unique instance in your game project, such as your graphics pipeline and input libraries, as having more than one of these in your projects doesn't make sense.

This single object uses a static variable and static functions to be able to access the object without having to pass it through all of our code.

In the Mach5 engine, Singletons are used for the application...