![]() ![]() unknown = "unknown" # The state the game engine would rightly be set to before # anything is initialized or configured. ![]() """ # Unknown state, indicating possible error or misconfiguration. We won’t get into the weeds of that at all, as the concept of state machines is very intuitive to most people, and especially to programmers, who often end up creating state machines without necessarily knowing that it’s a formal discipline.Įnum for the Game's State Machine. Finite State Automata / State Machinesįinite State Automata is just one facet of the model of computation in Computer Science. Boolean variables are very useful, and the demo makes great use of them.īut there’s a way of capturing the state of a game in a manner that is easier to reason about. That’s not to say the boolean approach is bad. Furthermore, you may have a set of paths that a user must navigate through to get to certain screens for instance, going from the main menu to the score screen is usually not possible. You might render two different things on the screen. If you accidentally set two to True your game will most probably break in awkward ways. So, every time you switch from one screen (and functional part of the game) to another you must remember to update all those boolean flags. ![]() In_main_menu = True in_game_playing = False in_score_screen = False in_level_editor = False in_options_screen = False #. Naively, you could store what your game’s currently supposed to display to the user with an endless number of booleans: The main game where you play the actual gameĪ win and loss screen that records your score and how well you did Booleans everywhereĬonsider an attempt to write a simple game with a handful of screens and how you’d track what screen it’s on:Ī main menu that you first encounter when you start the game, or quit out to when you exit from the game play or map editor. So why is statefulness important? Because it’s all too easy to ensnare important business logic in simple variables, and add layer upon layer of information of top of that. Regardless of how, we usually store this in variables, or more generically, in memory somewhere, given whatever loose definition of memory we may choose to use. In a toy application that asks for your name and repeats it back, it could be a variable called name that makes our application stateful - that is, our program is storing, and can recall at will, information we either gave it explicitly, or that it generated implicitly, by perhaps reading something from a file or database. ![]() What is Statefulness?Īll useful computer programs capture some form of state. To improve our code’s extensibility, it’s time to consider how we can effectively use a simple state machine to represent the state the game is in, and how OOP and inheritance can help with separation of concerns. – you should consider formalizing your stateful code using finite state automata, or commonly called a state machine. Navigating from one screen in a game to another involves a lot of change: you need to render different things the key bindings you use may change also and perhaps you need to clear out old objects, like if you change from game play to the score screen.īut instead of having an ever-increasing number of variables to represent what your code is supposed to do – like, is_in_menu, has_won_game, is_in_level_editor, etc. Complex codebases – and games are usually complex – tend to rely on a lot of state, usually captured in variables. ![]()
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