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

Issues with object pools


Now, as great as object pools are, we should take some time to talk about times when you would not want to use object pools, and the alternatives out there.

First of all, you need to remember that when you are using a memory manager, you are telling the computer that you are smarter than them and that you know how the data should be handled. This is more power than other languages tend to give you, and using Uncle Ben's famous line, "with great power comes great responsibility" as we mentioned previously in this book in Chapter 2One Instance to Rule Them All - Singletons. When using an object pool, you typically want to use it when objects only have a limited lifetime and a lot of them will be created, but not all at the same time. If at one point in time you'll have 10,000 on the screen, but the rest of the game you'll have 30 max, that 9,970 other objects' worth of memory will just be standing there waiting for you in the unlikely event that you want to use it...