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Mastering SFML Game Development

You're reading from   Mastering SFML Game Development Inject new life and light into your old SFML projects by advancing to the next level.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786469885
Length 442 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Raimondas Pupius Raimondas Pupius
Author Profile Icon Raimondas Pupius
Raimondas Pupius
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Under the Hood - Setting up the Backend FREE CHAPTER 2. Its Game Time! - Designing the Project 3. Make It Rain! - Building a Particle System 4. Have Thy Gear Ready - Building Game Tools 5. Filling the Tool Belt - a few More Gadgets 6. Adding Some Finishing Touches - Using Shaders 7. One Step Forward, One Level Down - OpenGL Basics 8. Let There Be Light - An Introduction to Advanced Lighting 9. The Speed of Dark - Lighting and Shadows 10. A Chapter You Shouldnt Skip - Final Optimizations

Service locator pattern

Often, one or more of our classes will need access to another part of our code base. Usually, it's not a major issue. All you would have to do is pass a pointer or two around, or maybe store them once as data members of the class in need. However, as the amount of code grows, relationships between classes get more and more complex. Dependencies can increase to a point, where a specific class will have more arguments/setters than actual methods. For convenience's sake, sometimes it's better to pass around a single pointer/reference instead of ten. This is where the service locator pattern comes in:

class Window; 
class EventManager; 
class TextureManager; 
class FontManager; 
... 
struct SharedContext{ 
  SharedContext(): 
    m_wind(nullptr), 
    m_eventManager(nullptr), 
    m_textureManager(nullptr), 
    m_fontManager(nullptr), 
    ... 
  {} 
 
  Window* m_wind; 
  EventManager* m_eventManager; 
  TextureManager* m_textureManager; 
  FontManager* m_fontManager; 
  ... 
}; 

As you can see, it's just a struct with multiple pointers to the core classes of our project. All of those classes are forward-declared in order to avoid unnecessary include statements, and thus a bloated compilation process.

You have been reading a chapter from
Mastering SFML Game Development
Published in: Jan 2017
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781786469885
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