Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Sharing Objects with the Flyweight Pattern

We previously learned about object pools in Chapter 7, Improving Performance with Object Pools, and that they are great for avoiding slowdowns in our game due to dynamic memory allocation. But, there are still other steps that we can take to reduce the amount of memory that we use to begin with.

When creating projects, you'll often run into times where you want to have many objects on the screen at once. While computers have become much more powerful over the past few years, they still can't handle thousands of complex game objects on the screen by themselves.

In order to accomplish this feat, programmers need to think of ways to lighten the memory load on their program. Using the Flyweight pattern, ...