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

The benefits of the command pattern


If looking at all that crazy code makes your eyes glaze over, you are not alone. The complex syntax of function pointers and pointer to member functions calls are some of the most difficult parts of C++. For that reason, many people avoid them. However, they also miss out on the power offered by such features.

On the other hand, just because something is powerful, it doesn't mean it is always the right tool for the job. Simple is often better and, because of the many levels of indirection, code like we just saw has the chance to cause a lot of bugs. It will be up to you to decide if using these tools is right for your project. That being said, let's discuss some of the benefits of using the Command pattern so you can better decide when and where to use it.

Treating a function call like an object

The biggest benefit of using the Command pattern is that we are encapsulating the function or method call and the parameters. This means that everything needed for...