cocos2d for iPhone

A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine

1. 

   Decept
   Member

   I've made a tile/grid system that I'm going to use for A* pathfinding and stuff. Now I want to move the code to its own source files so that I can more easely reuse the system on different projects. But as each project will probably need slighlty different MapNode objects, I need some way to customize this.
   I'm still pretty new to Obj-C so I may not be fully aware of all the implications for the different solutions.

   I was thinking of maybe using a MapObject class that I can inherit from in each project. But that may be a little messy. Another idea is to use categories. I don't really know.
   As the grid will have many MapObjects size is an issue and probably performance as well.

   Any suggestions?

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   lgoss007
   Member

   Not so much an Obj-C thing... more of a class design thing and class design takes a lot of experience to hone in on the skill. It's hard to get right the first time and as you get more experienced in the subject matter you find flaws which you can fix by rearranging things. But don't let that stop you, it's good practice and a big help for future projects. Basically you want to minimize the chance of big changes and make sure your objects are self contained. Here are some good articles on designing:

   Design Principles and Patterns
   OO Design Principles

   Posted 2 years ago #
3. 

   Decept
   Member

   Sorry for not making myself clear, but I have over 10 years of experience making C++ games and programs, so OO design is no problem. For me, it is an Obj-C problem (and an iPhone problem). I don't know what solutions are slow/fast with this language and device. For example in C++ on a PC one should be aware not to create unneccesary complex objects with polymorphism and such, if they are small and used very very often, like particles and maybe map tiles.

   Posted 2 years ago #
4. 

   Steve Oldmeadow
   Administrator

   @Decept - if you have ten years C++ why would you do this sort of thing in Objective C? I do anything like you are proposing in C++ and the STL. Box2D shows how you can successfully mix C++ and Objective C. One advantage of doing non platform specific stuff in C++ is that it is much easier to port to other platforms should you ever want to.

   Posted 2 years ago #
5. 

   Decept
   Member

   A* is not that complicated to code and I wonder if there will be any significant performance gains by using C++.

   I think I will look at how one can mix C++ and Obj-C but I'm not sure it will be less messy than using only Obj-C on both game and A* system.

   Posted 2 years ago #
6. 

   Steve Oldmeadow
   Administrator

   C++ can perform better, particularly comparing something like NSArray vs STL's vector.

   This may be of interest:
   http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/1765#post-11073

   Posted 2 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.