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

Building the object pool for Mach5


Now that we've seen an object pool in action, let's next learn how we can integrate the Object Pool pattern into the Mach5 game engine. Since we are creating a shooter game, one of the things that we spawn a lot during gameplay are the laser bullets from our ship, which makes it perfect for using object pool functionality. And unlike the previous examples, we'll see a version of the object pool that will not need to use pointers to access the pool, and we'll not have to worry about the pool being created. To do this, we'll need to make some adjustments to the starter project. First, we are going to need to change how our bullets are destroyed.

If you go into the Bullet.ini file located at Mach5-master\EngineTest\EngineTest\ArcheTypes, you'll see the following:

posX = 0
posY = 0
velX = 0
velY = 0
scaleX = 2.5
scaleY = 2.5
rot = 0
rotVel = 0
components = GfxComponent ColliderComponent OutsideViewKillComponent

[GfxComponent]
texture = bullet.tga
drawSpace ...