Gamedev Lounge 0010

[TheShyGuy]

I'm curious on how you all structure the inner engine in your games. Like what sort of little bits of hidden manager type objects/code you have running behind the scenes.

It has been a little while since i worked on the core engine of a 2D game. I used a component based system. This basically means that "unique" objects are created through aggregation/composition of smaller and unique behaviors/components. It allows for data-driven design too. It would be better for you to google than it would for me to explain these in detail.

I'm asking because the my last attempt at tried to code a game ended up unable to scroll a loaded level without lagging severely. I suspect the reason either I structured/sorted everything really badly or just horrid collision detection.

Although I don't have the slightest clue as to how you coded your game, my best bet would be the collision detection. Look into collision techniques, especially broad-phase collision detection. However, if you have a tile-based game going on, you can just check only surrounding tiles for an object. Also the ol' don't update or render anything outside of the screen area.

Even if its the latter, I think it'd be interesting to see how others do it. I just had an object manager class thing, and then a level manager that managed all the tile objects in the objectmanager... and I think thats where I messed up.

Do some googling. My entity system was "similar" to your vague statement. I had a Level class that contained *everything in the level, including a CollisionManger. This manager used all the collisionComponents of the level class and ...well did collision detection. -I should mention that the manager didn't just brute force test collision between every single object.

*I never got around to designing anything more than a "level". So this might not have been the best choice longterm.

I would show an example of the layout of how i implemented the system, but i think it would be better for you to just google and do a bit of research. Learning never hurts.