Asset Management

In today's episode of offswitch development nonsense, I'm going to talk about the asset management system I made! Rather, I'm going to talk about the old system and how terrible it was before describing the new system and how much better it is! This post will have pictures instead of code, so that's exciting.

When I say asset, I'm referring to elements of the game: backgrounds/gradients, buttons, enemies, statics (doors, levers, etc), and the player. Just to clarify, background and gradient are kind of misleading names.. the gradient object I refer to is the scene painted behind the level, and the background object is the platforms and walls of the actual level. I should REALLY get around to renaming those things before I get called out on it.

So I'll explain the old system. For fellow java programmers out there, I created an Asset object with some generic methods/variables, then made all six of the game objects I listed extend Asset. My "Asset Management System" was just an Asset array. Since all of the different things extended Asset, I could throw them all into the array. In English, this is the equivalent to dumping everything into a large box. Whenever I needed to access an objects, I had to go digging through the box and check what each thing was. And just about everything in the box needed to access just about everything else in the box. If the player needed to access the background to check for collision, It had to search through the box to find the background and then check the pixel needed. This led to a lot of weird dependencies and channels of communication between all of the different objects. I drew a picture, both to illustrate the unnecessary complexity of this system and to demonstrate why Marty is doing ALL of the drawings.

It doesn't take a programmer to tell that this system redefines terrible. So I decided to rip it all out and redesign it!

The new system creates an Asset object, which is a custom data structure containing all of the individual objects and a few methods for them to interact. Each object is given a handle to the Asset object, so if they need to talk to each other they can trace up to the Asset and access the object they need. This is both entirely more efficient and WAY easier to understand, as the following picture demonstrates.

Way better, right?