For every game I've made, I just end up placing all my game objects (bullets, cars, players) in a single array list, which I loop through to draw and update. The update code for each entity is stored within it's class.
I've been wondering, is this the right way to go about things, or is a faster more efficient way?
Answer
There is no one right way. What you're describing works, and is presumably fast enough that it doesn't matter since you seem to be asking because you're concerned about the design and not because it's caused you performance issues. So it is a right way, sure.
You could certainly do it differently, by for example keeping a homogenous list for each object type or by ensuring everything in your heterogenous list is grouped together such that you have improved coherency for the code that is in-cache or to allow parallel updates. Whether you'd see any appreciable performance improvement by doing this is difficult to say without knowing the scope and scale of your games.
You could also further factor out the responsibilities of your entities -- it sounds like entities both update and render themselves at the moment -- to better follow the Single Responsibility Principle. This can increase the maintainability and flexibility of your individual interfaces by decoupling them from one another. But again, whether or you'd see a benefit from the extra work that would entail is hard for me to say knowing what I know of your games (which is basically nothing).
I would recommend not stressing too much about it, and keep in the back of your head that it might be a potential area for improvement if you ever notice performance or maintainability issues.
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