Basically, in any game source I've found, and even in game dev books, all code is written with tons of these manager classes: ResourceManager, DisplayManager, KeyboardManager, EnemyManager, ManagerManager, etc. I feel like this MUST be bad design; it just goes against every principle you learn as you're learning programming. Hell, most of the time these classes are just wrappers around global variables; the only difference being you need to add the overhead of function calls to use them. And if you look into it, people always tell you, in what I imagine as a snooty rich person's voice, "There's no need that I can think of for singletons~" but never give a fuckin' alternative.
Take ResourceManager for example. This one is probably the best example of this pattern working. Pseudocode would look like
Code: Select all
class ResourceManager
{
public:
Texture* LoadTexture( std::string path );
private:
Texture* PlayerTexture;
};
Keeping on the bullet hell example, in order to continually redraw bullets, I believe I would need some kind of BulletManager. Example:
Code: Select all
class BulletManager
{
public:
BulletManager( ResourceManager& rm );
void RenderAllBullets();
private:
ResourceManager Resources;
};
Also note that I passed in the resource manager via reference, which is basically how people recommend getting rid of global access. I can't imagine tossing these pointers around all over the place is very cache safe.
My question is basically: does anyone else have a different solution to keeping track of your entities or do you use manager classes?
