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Singleton Pattern for Game Devs

The Singleton design pattern ensures that only one instance of a class is created, and provides a global access point to that instance. It involves creating a private constructor, and a public static method that checks if an instance exists already, and if not, creates and returns a new instance. This allows any part of the application to access the single instance without having to pass the reference around. Mammoth uses a Singleton to distribute unique IDs to game objects through a single IdDistributor instance.

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Jeetendra Kumar
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95 views13 pages

Singleton Pattern for Game Devs

The Singleton design pattern ensures that only one instance of a class is created, and provides a global access point to that instance. It involves creating a private constructor, and a public static method that checks if an instance exists already, and if not, creates and returns a new instance. This allows any part of the application to access the single instance without having to pass the reference around. Mammoth uses a Singleton to distribute unique IDs to game objects through a single IdDistributor instance.

Uploaded by

Jeetendra Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Diving in: the Singleton Design Pattern

Mammoth is a massively
multiplayer game research
framework.
mammoth.cs.mcgill.ca
The world of Mammoth is a 2D
environment viewed from a 2D
perspective.
The world contains a fixed
number of game objects, some
of which can be controlled by
humans (players).
A player can move around in the
game, examine objects, pick
them up, and drop them again.
Hans Vangheluwe and Alexandre Denault
IDs?

Each object in the world ( player, items, grass, etc ) has a


unique ID associated to it.
How do we hand out IDs, making sure that one never
distributes a duplicate one?
ID Distributor

Mammoth uses unique identifiers (ID) to identify all the


Game objects in the world.
These IDs are distributed by a single object.
If more than one distributor were used, duplicate IDs could be
distributed.
The application needs global access to this distributor.
It would be very complicated/ugly to pass around the reference to the
distributor throughout the application.
Problem

We need to make sure that only one instance of a class can


be created.
We want that instance to be easy to access anywhere in the
application.
Singleton

Ensure a class only has one instance,


and provide a global point of access to it.
Class Diagram
Code Structure

public class Singleton {

private static Singleton instance = new Singleton();

private Singleton() { }

public static Singleton getInstance() {


return Singleton.instance;
}
}
Consequences

You are assured that only one instance can be created.


Global access to that instance without the use of a global variable
(less pollution)
Can be modified to allow a fixed number of instances.
Singletons can be sub-classed.
ID Distributor Example
public class IdDistributor {

private static IdDistributor instance = new


IdDistributor();
private long lastId;

private IdDistributor() {
this.lastId = -1;
}
public static IdDistributor getInstance() {
return IdDistributor.instance;
}
public long getId() {
this.lastId++;
return this.lastId;
}
}
Lazy Initialization

public class Singleton {

private static Singleton instance;

private Singleton() { }

public static Singleton getInstance() {


if (Singleton.instance == null) {
Singleton.instance = new Singleton()
}

return Singleton.instance;
}
}
Lazy Initialization (Better)

public class Singleton {

private static Singleton instance;

private Singleton() { }

public static synchronized Singleton getInstance() {


if (Singleton.instance == null) {
Singleton.instance = new Singleton()
}

return Singleton.instance;
}
}
Dsheet
Singleton

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