unterrainerinformatik/pooling

This class implements a lock-free object pool for your game-code that sports automatic creation and events to hook.

General

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Pooling

This class implements a lock-free object pool.
Such things are very handy when developing games because you wouldn't want to run the garbage collector at all in order to reduce lags. But there are times when you have to use a class instead of a struct and that's the point where you want to hold on to your objects and re-use them.

This pool does exactly that and it offers you some convenience features like events to hook into or automatic object-creation (using variable constructor signatures) as well.

Just make the class you'd like to pool implement the PoolItem interface, create a new pool and give it the right constructor fields that are needed to create your object.
After using the object, just return it to the pool.

This pool isn't created using a fixed size, but is allowed to grow as big as you need it to be while reusing all objects as much as it can.

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Example

Pool<Sprite> PoolInstance = new Pool<Sprite>(new object[] {spriteBatch, game, tokens.AttackSpriteToken});
// Optional: Maybe you'd like to add a event handler.
// We'll just call a method on the sprite class upon return of the object:
PoolInstance.Returned += (sender, e) => e.Item.Return();

Then, later on, retrieve a new or reused item from the pool:

Sprite s = PoolInstance.Get();

...
s.Update(gameTime);
...

This either gives you a reused sprite, or, when needed, automatically creates a new Sprite from scratch.

When you're done with it, return it to the pool:

PoolInstance.Return(s);
// If you've specified the event hanlder above, this will be the time when it's called.

After you're done, clean up the pool:

PoolInstance.Dispose();

That takes care of your registered events and objects in the pool.