There is a number of data structure types that are useful within games: arrays, hash tables, vectors, linked lists, and so forth. And there are also a lot of publicly available implementations of such classes, first of all the Standard Template Library, for those who code in C++.
However, most of these libraries are designed with the concept in mind that they have to be useful to everybody and for whatever application. One result of this philosophy is that these classes end up being huge packages, bloated by the amount of features they have to add to make them general purpose. The other main result is that these libraries end up being slow in execution, at least from the perspective of a video game that needs to run in real time.
Based on the above considerations, I developed a set of template data classes aimed to be fast, rather than sophisticated, and simple. I plan to publish these template classes as part of my DZgameEngine, although they are independent from the rest of the engine and can be extracted and used with any other program or application.
My goal is to keep enhancing these classes to make them as fast as possible in terms of execution time. They will be published on the DZgameEngine repository in Github in the next few days. I will follow up with a description of each one template class in this blog, so to make it easier for everybody to use them. And since the classes will be open source, everybody will be free to make changes to them to improve their capabilities. I will be happy to work with anybody willing to help me achieve this goal.
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