[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 16 ■ Collision Detection: Creating SVG Polygons for the Game Actors and Writing Code to Detect Collision
Figure 16-40. The finished .collide() method is error-free and only 19 lines of code, and is ready for further optimization
If you use a Run ➤ Project work process, and test your game code now, you will not only hear the audio, you will
also see the Prop objects disappear upon collision with the InvinciBagel object. I’m going to leave the audio in this
code for now, so you can test to see if these Actor objects are really gone by have the InvinciBagel run (or fly) over the
area where the Prop object was to make sure (using your ears) that it’s really gone. Next, we’ll optimize the code even
more, by implementing the if(collide(object)) approach that I mentioned earlier, having the .collide() method simply
return a true (collision detected) or false (no collision detected) value, as a properly behaved Boolean method should.
Optimizing Collision Detection Processing: if(collide(object))
To optimize the collision detection process, we’ll move code that is executed on collision up to the .checkCollision()
method, inside of an if(collide(object)){} conditional if block of Java code. This allows us to eliminate a Boolean
collisionDetect variable from the collide() method, making it much more streamlined. All we are doing now in the
.collide() method is pass the return true; statement back up to the calling entity, in this case, the .checkCollision()
method, if a collision is detected. This also allows us to completely eliminate the if(collisionDetect) structure as well.
Before this optimization, we had 6 lines of code in the .checkCollision() method, and 19 lines of code in the
.collide() method. After the optimization, we have 5 less lines of Java code, with 10 lines of code in each method. The
new Java structures for these methods are error-free, as shown in Figure 16-41, and look like the following Java code:
public void checkCollision() {
for(int i=0; i