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

Why you should care about memory


As a programmer, you're probably already used to using new and delete (or malloc and free if you're writing C), and you may be wondering why you would want to handle memory by yourself when it's already built into the language and is easy to use. Well, the first thing is that like most aspects of using a high-level programming language, you do not know what is going on behind the scenes. If you write your own logic to handle memory, you can create your own statistics and additional debugging support, such as automatically initializing data. You can also check for things such as memory leaks.

However, for game developers the most important aspect to look into is that of performance. Allocating memory for a single object or thousands of them at once is approximately the same time as the computer needs to look through your computer's memory for an opening that isn't being used, and then give you the address to the beginning of that contiguous piece of memory...