Data Structures and Design Patterns for Games

Dave Cortez has more than twenty-five years of experience working with hardware, software development, and quality assurance, nine years of which were dedicated to technical education. For the past ten years, Dave has created custom technical educational curricula. His first foray into publishing was as a technical reviewer for an algorithms text. He currently teaches in post-secondary education, specializing in video game theory, 2D and 3D graphics, and software project management. He is secretly a robotics engineer and enjoys programming Artificial Intelligence. Dave can be found, on occasion, trekking through the California Sierras.

Introduction. PART I: DYNAMIC MEMORY, DATA STRUCTURES, & DESIGN PATTERNS. 1. Dynamic Memory & Data Structures. 2. Design Pattern Types In Games. 3. Data Structure Traversal. PART II: DESIGN PATTERNS & LINEAR DATA STRUCTURES. 4. Linked-Lists As Chain-Of-Responsibility. 5. Singletons As Game Managers. 6. Factories As Game Entity Generators. 7. Decorators Allow Game Entities To Assume More Artifacts. PART III: DESIGN PATTERNS & HIERARCHICAL DATA STRUCTURES. 8. Trees As Scene Managers. 9. Graphs & Dungeon Traversal. 10. State Patterns, Graphs, Finite State Machines, & Artificial Intelligence. Appendix A: Visual Studio 2010 & Lab Completion. Appendix C: Unified Modeling Language. Appendix D: Inheritance, Polymorphism, & Abstraction. Appendix E: Asymptotic Analysis, Growth, and Big-O Notation.