What design pattern is best for an RTS game in AS3?

I'm looking to get some g开发者_如何学Pythonood books on design patterns and I'm wondering what particular pattern you'd recommend for a Realtime Strategy Game (like Starcraft), MVC?.

I'd like to make a basic RTS in Flash at some point and I want to start studying the best pattern for this.

Cheers!

The problem with this kind of question is the answer is it completely depends on your design. RTS games are complicated even simple ones. They have many systems that have to work together and each of those systems has to be designed differently with a common goal.

But to talk about it a little here goes.

The AI system in an rts usually has a few different levels to it. There is the unit level AI which can be as simple as a switch based state machine all the way up to a full scale behavior tree (composite/decorators). You also generally need some type of high level planning system for the strategic level AI. (the commander level and the AI player) There are usually a few levels in between those also and some side things like resource managers etc. You can also go with event based systems which tie in nicely with flash's event based model as well.

For the main game engine itself a basic state machine (anything from switch based to function based to class based) can easily be implemented to tie everything together and tie in the menu system with that.

For the individual players a Model-View-Controller is a very natural pattern to aim for because you want your AI players to be exposed to everything the human player has access to. Thus the only change would be the controller (the brain) without the need for a view obviously.

As I said this isn't something that can just be answered like the normal stackoverflow question it is completely dependent on the design and how you decide to implement it. (like most things) There are tons of resources out there about RTS game design and taking it all in is the only advice I can really give. Even simple RTS's are complex systems.

Good luck to you and I hope this post gives you an idea of how to think about it. (remember balance is everything in an RTS)

To support lots of units, you might employ Flyweight and Object Pool. Flyweight object can be stored entirely in a few bytes in a large ByteArray. To get usable object, read corresponding bytes, take empty object and fill it with data from those bytes. Object pool can hold those usable objects to prevent constant allocation/garbage collection. This way, you can hold thousands of units in ByteArray and manage them via dozen of pooled object shells.
It should be noted that this is more suitable to store tile properties that units, however — tile are more-or-less static, while units are created and destroyed on regular basis.

It would be good to be familiar with a number of design patterns and apply them to the architecture of your game where appropriate.

For example, you may employ an MVC architecture for your overall application, factory pattern for creating enemies, decorator pattern for shop items, etc. Point being, design patterns are simply methodologies for structuring your objects. How you define those object and how you decide how they fit together is non prescriptive.