Understanding Object Pooling
The second programming pattern we’ll see is Object Pooling. The purpose of this pattern is to keep up the frame rate of our game while still being able to create and destroy many objects or nodes. Let’s take a deeper dive into what we are trying to solve – that is, the problem.
The problem
In some games, we want to be able to spawn and remove objects really quickly. In the little game that we have constructed over the course of the book, for example, we want to be able to spawn and remove projectiles and arrows fast and reliably. With the rates our arrows are being shot at now, this is not a big issue, but it could become one if we increased this rate, especially in multiplayer. Creating new nodes – for example, by using the instantiate() function we saw in Chapter 10 and adding them to the scene tree – is pretty slow. The game needs to load the scene file from disk and then allocate new memory every time we create...
