Summary
We have expanded our knowledge of the stack and the heap. We know that local variables are on the stack and are only accessible while in scope and that classes and their member variables are on the heap and are accessible at any time, provided the currently executing code has a reference to the required instance. We also know that if an object has no reference on the stack, it will be garbage collected. This is good because it frees up memory but is also potentially problematic because it uses processor time, which can affect the performance of our game.
We have made a good start with the Snake game, though most of the code we wrote was similar to previous projects. The exception was the way in which we selectively called the update method only when one-tenth of a second had elapsed since the previous call to the update method.
In the next chapter, we will do something a little bit different and see how we can localize a game (using Snake as an example) to provide text...