I have written following game server and want to provide a groups feature. Groups will allow to group players together who are “nearby” on screen. In fast action games, this group would be changing fast since players will be moving in and out of their zones constantly.
Since each player would need to listen to events from other players in the group, players will subscribe to the group.
This brings me to my question. What is the appropriate datastructure or java collection class which can be used in this scenario to hold the changing set of event listeners on a group? The number of listeners to a group would rarely exceed 20 in my opinion, and should be lesser than that in most scenarios. It is a multi-threaded environment.
The one I am planning to use is a CopyOnWriteArrayList. But since there will be reasonable amount of updates(due to changing subscriptions) is this class appropriate? What other class would be good to use? If you have any custom implementation using array’s etc please share.
Do players have integer IDs? If so then I have an lightweight, immutable array-based set class that might make sense for you:
This was written for similar kinds of situations in game engines.
However I also have an alternative approach to consider: If you are updating the groups automatically based on vicinity, then you might want to consider not tracking groups at all. Instead, consider using a spatial data structure that allows you to quickly search for nearby players whenever an event occurs, and directly send the event to nearby players.
Typically you could use a 2D or 3D grid or octree with the smallest division size set to be equal to the max range for your groups. Then a vicinity search will only need to check 9 (2D case) or 27 (3D case) locations in order to find all nearby players. I think doing this search whenever needed will be faster and simpler than the overhead of maintaining lists of groups and listeners all the time….