Static or dynamic class?

Question

A followup to this post: Need advice on design/structure of a game

I have Game.cs, which essentially holds my gamestate. All necessary variables will be included here when everything is said and done to make saving, loading, and starting a new game easier. My question is this: Should this class be static or dynamic? I tried dynamic, but I can't figure out where to instantiate it properly. At the moment, Game.cs is instantiated when a button click event fires in a Windows Form, but afterward is treated as a local variable and it can't be accessed elsewhere. Is there a way to instantiate it globally? Or in this case is static the way to go?

BTW, `dynamic` isn't really the word you are looking for. A `Dynamic` object is one whose variables and methods are established at runtime, not compile time. Also see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/241339/when-to-use-static-classes-in-c-sharp — NotMe, May 14 '13 at 22:08

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 14 '13 at 22:04

Have the Game class be an instance class: everything should be instance fields/properties/methods, not static.

Within your game, you should have just one instance of the Game class. You could pass it around to all of the other classes, or you could just make it global, by making it a public static public field on some class.

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '13 at 22:04

3

As a rule of thumb, static classes/methods should be stateless. If you want to have your data accessible from anywhere, you should go for the Singleton-Pattern.

public class Game
{
    private static Game instance;
    public static Game Instance
    {
        get
        {
            if (instance == null)
            {
                instance = new Game();
            }
            return instance;
        }
    }

    private Game()
    {
    }

    private int someData;

    public string SomeMethod()
    {
    }

    // ...
}

Then, access it in your code like so:

string myString = Game.Instance.SomeMethod();

answered May 14 '13 at 22:04

Jan Dörrenhaus

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I would consider it common courtesy for the one who downvoted my answer to at least tell me what was disliked about it. – Jan Dörrenhaus May 14 '13 at 22:12
I can hazard a guess: some folks consider Singleton a bit of an anti-pattern, akin to global variables. – Robert Harvey May 14 '13 at 22:19
Fair enough. A damn side better than the alternative, though ;) – Jan Dörrenhaus May 14 '13 at 22:23
They're also difficult to do properly: http://csharpindepth.com/articles/general/singleton.aspx – Robert Harvey May 14 '13 at 22:25
Your original answer wasn't one, and it ended with "Example to follow". I downvoted you for starting with a placeholder instead of an actual answer. – user7116 May 14 '13 at 23:28
Actually, yes it was. I did not post "Hold on, answering" or something, I just did not give the example of a singleton pattern. The answer itself was - IMHO - completely valid. – Jan Dörrenhaus May 14 '13 at 23:42

Static or dynamic class?

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