Using arrays in the Snake game
In the Bullet Hell game, we declared an arbitrarily sized array of bullets, hoping that the player would never spawn too many. We could have used an array so big it would have been impossible to go out of bounds (but that would be a waste of memory), or we could have restricted the number of bullets, but that wouldn't have been fun.
With the Snake game, we don't know how many segments there will be, so we need a better solution. The ArrayList
class is the solution we will use.
Understanding ArrayList class
An ArrayList
is like a regular Java array on steroids. It overcomes some of the shortfalls of arrays, such as having to predetermine their size. It adds some useful methods to make its data easy to manage and it uses an enhanced version of a for
loop, which is easier to use than a regular for
loop. You can also use ordinary for
loops with the ArrayList
class too.
We will learn about enhanced for
loops now as it is convenient....