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I am building a game where I need top handle A LOT of sound effects. I created an object pool for the effects to be able to reuse them. My problem is how I should write a nice pool solution without having to create a pool for each sound type. The checkout function of the pool returns the first sound in the list.

This little dirty solution checks if the item we borrow from the pool has the same sound that I want to create. If it is the same sound, I don´t create the sound again. If it is not, I create it even if I know there are instances of the correct sound in the pool. 

var item : ISoundItem = _soundPool.checkOut();

if(item.name != name)
    item.create(name, _soundFactory.create(name), config);

This dirty solution has reduced my instances to about seven instances from being hundreds, but I think I can optimize it even more.

I have been thinking of passing the sound name to the checkout function, but is it really worth having to loop through the pool each time?

Any ideas?

Mattias
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1 Answers1

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If you're looking for quick lookups and you have many different sounds, you might consider using a Dictionary object to hold sound references instead of a Vector or an Array. Dictionaries don't use iterations for lookups - it's always one-to-one. You'd do something like this:

var item : ISoundItem = _soundPool.checkOut(MySoundA);
var item : ISoundItem = _soundPool.checkOut(MySoundB);

Calling by name in this case would have no penalty. You would want to make sure that your class would only allow objects that implement ISoundItem to be added to your Dictionary, though.

This implementation depends on how often you use the sounds. If you don't use them often, this would probably work fine. If they're long sounds or you use them very rapidly, you might consider doing a dictionary of arrays or something of that sort.

  • The effects are played often, wich means that the pool will have duplicates. – Mattias Nov 01 '11 at 17:44
  • @Mattias Hmm. I could probably find some hacks around this, but truthfully, there's probably a specific data structure that does what you're looking for. In your case, though, I'd recommend a Dictionary of Arrays for specific items, or a Dictionary of linked lists. –  Nov 01 '11 at 17:59
  • Hmm. Maybe this is the best approach after all. I will try using a dictionary containing Vectors. Thanks. – Mattias Nov 01 '11 at 19:55
  • @Mattias Sorry I couldn't be of more assistance. I feel as though there's likely a data structure that really does what you need, but I don't have enough knowledge of data structures to really help you there. Wish I did, though. AS3 might not have the optimal datatype natively, but I think there are some external libraries that provide other datatypes. –  Nov 01 '11 at 21:02
  • @Mattias It might also help to look through some datatypes - there's a section on multimaps here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimap –  Nov 02 '11 at 17:24