Questions tagged [design-patterns]
Design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design.
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Why are MVC & TDD not employed more in game architecture? [closed]
I will preface this by saying I haven't looked a huge amount of game source, nor built much in the way of games.
But coming from trying to employ 'enterprise' coding practices in web apps, looking at ...
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What are some programming design patterns that are useful in game development? [closed]
I have a few books on Design Patterns, and have read some articles, but cannot intuitively figure out which programming design patterns would be useful in game development.
For example, I have a book ...
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In Unity, how do I correctly implement the singleton pattern?
I have seen several videos and tutorials for creating singleton objects in Unity, mainly for a GameManager, that appear to use different approaches to instantiating ...
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How to avoid the GameManager god object?
I just read an answer to a question about structuring game code. It made me wonder about the ubiquitous GameManager class, and how it often becomes an issue in a ...
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When is the best time to consider performance?
I am coming from software development background. During the software
development cycle, we usually focus on functionalities and the working
product. At the end of development, we start optimizing ...
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Do retail games use "inversion of control" and "dependency injection"?
Many of the more diligent software developers I know are moving to inversion of control and dependency injection to handle references to objects. Coming from a Flash games perspective I don't know all ...
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"The Game Object" - and component-based design
I've been working on some hobby projects the last 3-4 years. Just simple 2d and 3d games. But lately I have started a bigger project. Soo in the last couple of months I've been trying to design a game ...
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How to Interpolate between two game states?
What is the best pattern to create a system that all the objects positions to be interpolated between two update states?
The update will always run at the same frequency, but I want to be able to ...
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answer
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Why should I always consider creating and using object pools instead of instantiating the new object on the fly?
I have read about this pattern several times (from a best-practices perspective):
Memory Allocation: Instead of instantiating the new object on the fly, always consider creating and using object ...
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Memory allocation patterns used in game development
I have been researching creating my own allocator methods (that will support things such as a memory pool and profiling), however, as I continue my research I have been looking for how this was done ...
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Command Ordering Architecture of Dwarf Fortress
What is the most elegant way to implement a command ordering system for AI? for example in dwarf fortress when you mark a forested area for wood cutting, the dwarfs then would do the following ...
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How to design context menus based on whatever the object is?
I'm looking for a solution for a "Right Click Options" behaviour.
Basically any and every item in a game, when right clicked, can display a set of options based on whatever the object is.
Right ...
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How to create a user-friendly magic spell system?
I'm designing a small 2D top-down open-world survival-ish game with a magic spell system. The way it works so far:
The player receives a "wand" at the beginning of the game
As the player encounters ...
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21
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Design of a turn-based game where actions have side-effects
I am writing a computer version of the game Dominion. It is a turn-based card game where action cards, treasure cards, and victory point cards are accumulated into a player's personal deck. I have the ...
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Development pattern for interactive in-game tutorials
Interactive in-game tutorials often interrupt game flow and override standard behavior in a way that can be difficult to implement cleanly.
For example, imagine we have an action game and we want a ...
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What are the biggest pitfalls to consider when developing a new game?
I actually just started tracing (thanks David Young for the nomenclature correction) a couple of new web-based games for Facebook a few weeks ago and I have just been inundated with mental blocks and ...
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MVC-like compartmentalization in games? [closed]
I was contemplating the design of a game (translating a boardgame to the computer, specifically, which I suppose is relevant in this case) and it occurred to me that it might make sense to build the '...
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How can I design lots of different attack types that can be combined?
I'm making a top down 2D game and I want to have a lot of different attack types. I'd like to make the attacks very flexible and combine-able the way The Binding of Isaac works. Here's a list of all ...
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If "ResourceManager" classes are considered bad, what are the alternatives?
I'm hearing conflicting opinions such as:
"Dedicated Manager classes are almost never the right engineering tool"
"Dedicated Manager classes are (currently) the best way to survive a large project ...
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Designing a ResourceManager class
I've decided I want to write a central ResourceManager/ResourceCache class for my hobby game engine, but am having trouble designing a caching scheme.
The idea is that the ResourceManager has a soft ...
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How do I correctly use singletons in C++ engine programming?
I know singletons are bad, my old game engine used a singleton 'Game' object that handles everything from holding all data to the actual game loop. Now I'm making a new one.
The problem is, to draw ...
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Dictionary of common names for code objects [closed]
I'm looking for a common dictionary of terms (much like design patterns have a common language for how things interact) that are specific to games.
For instance, if I'm making a game of pong with a ...
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Does game development have its own types of modeling?
In general computer science there are modeling "languages" (read: standardized diagramming techniques) such as UML 1,2, in databases there are things like ERD3, in business there are other types such ...
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Designing a component based game
I'm writing a shooter (like 1942, classic 2D graphics) and I'd like to use a component based approch. So far I thought about the following design:
Each game element (airship, projectile, powerup, ...
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Should a socket server and game server be separate processes?
Assume a simple standard client/server game. For the server, is it worthwhile to have a separate process that listens for connections and messages from clients and sends the data via local sockets or ...
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Game Components, Game Managers and Object Properties
I'm trying to get my head around component based entity design.
My first step was to create various components that could be added to an object. For every component type i had a manager, which would ...
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Separating Game Engine from game code in similar games, with versioning
I have a finished game, that I want to decline in other versions. These would be similar games, with more or less the same kind of design, but not always, basically things might change, sometimes ...
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Is Domain Driven Design good for games?
I've just read about Domain models and it enlightened me since I've been developing a game that has a class which only holds data (few behaviors/methods). I assigned the job of handling these classes ...
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How do I represent projectiles in a video game?
I'm making a simple fixed shooter game, similar to "Galaga",) as part of a presentation I'm doing. I'm wondering what strategies and data structures would people use for tracking projectiles, like ...
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Correct way to abstract an XBox Controller
I've got a XBox360 controller which I'd like to use as input for an application.
What I can't work out is the best-practice way to expose this via an interface.
Behind the scenes, the class which ...
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How to avoid singleton pattern for Event Scheduler?
I want to make an Event scheduler for my Game, I basically want to be able to schedule the triggering of a Game Event. This can be a one time trigger, or a periodic trigger (trigger event "...
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How do I avoid writing Manager classes?
I seem to keep reading it's a bad idea to use XxxManager style classes in game engine programming, yet even when I try to avoid their use I always end up with ...
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Creating a Robust Item System
My aim is to create a modular / as generic as possible item system which could handle things like:
Upgradeable Items (+6 Katana)
Stat Modifiers(+15 dexterity)
Item Modifiers(%X chance to do Y damage, ...
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Design patterns for rules systems?
As a quick fun project, I tried writing a solitaire game. But when getting to writing up the rules systems, I felt dirty, because my code felt completely unstructured and inextensible, mainly because ...
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Making character's skills and abilities as commands, good practice?
I am designing for a game that consist of characters who have unique offensive skills and other abilities such as building, repairing, etc. Players can control multiple of such characters.
I'm ...
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Per-Frame Function Calls versus Event Driven Messaging in Game Design
The traditional game design, as I know it, uses polymorphism and virtual functions to update game objects states. In other words, the same set of virtual functions are called in regular(ex: per-frame) ...
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Are there cases where globals/singletons are useful in game development? [closed]
I know that having global variables or singleton classes creates cases that can be difficult to test/manage and I have been busted in using those patterns in code but often times you gotta ship.
So ...
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Pattern for performing game actions
Is there a generally accepted pattern for performing various actions within a game? A way a player can perform actions and also that an AI might perform actions, such as move, attack, self-destruct, ...
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Separation of drawing and logic in games
I'm a developer that's just now starting to mess around with game development. I'm a .Net guy, so I've messed with XNA and am now playing around with Cocos2d for the iPhone. My question really is more ...
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I want to get rid of my make-everything-static-and-global design pattern, but how?
I'm making a little dungeon crawler in space, and I'd like to hear some advice on how to make the backend of the engine nicer. Basically, currently everything is based on a crapload of managers:
...
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Is it worthwhile to use particle pools in managed languages?
I was going to implement an object pool for my particle system in Java, then I found this on Wikipedia. To rephrase, it says that object pools aren't worth using in managed languages like Java and C#, ...
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Creating Entity as an aggregation
I recently asked about how to separate entities from their behaviour and the main answer linked to this article: http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy/
The ultimate concept ...
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Using "friend" classes in game development
Typically in C++ game development speed is valued over encapsulation, you therefore see a ton of publicly accessible class members which really shouldn't be public.
I seem to find in most cases that ...
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MVC or Components, or both?
I'm an experienced developer but recently I've been wanting to get into game programming but as you know game development is an entirely different beast from most other forms of programming (perhaps ...
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What's the appropiate way to achieve composition in Godot?
How?
I think I still don't properly understand how composition in Godot works. So, as far as I know, you 'compose' stuff in Godot, right? Like, if you want to make a rock you create a mesh node with ...
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Design of a camera system
Thinking about a common game, doesn't matter the type of the game, it's very likely that we need some camera type. For example:
Debug camera: controlled by keyboard and mouse, with that we are able ...
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How does an Engine like Source process entities?
On the Source engine (and it's antecessor, goldsrc, quake's) the game objects are divided in two types, world and entities. The world is the map geometry and the entities are players, particles, ...
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What pattern is this, and should I do it?
I'm making a game in as3 using flash develop and flash cs5. Everything is object oriented. I was wondering, should I have one "gateway" class that has a property-reference to all instantiations of ...
alex
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How should entities in a game reference each other?
I've been reading a lot about design patterns, but in using these patterns there's one question that I keep coming back to. How should my entities access information about each other?
Let's say I'm ...
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What are some ways to separate game logic from animations and the draw loop?
I have only previously made flash games, using MovieClips and such to separate out my animations from my game logic. Now I am getting into trying my hand at making a game for Android, but the game ...
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