Application of the engine

[marshdabeachy]

Hey all,

I stumbled across this engine while I was looking to improve my own. My engines always turn into spaghetti code, because I always get lazy and try to do stuff the fastest way possible, which of course is never the right way. Long story short, the development of my game is on hold while I basically revamp my engine to function similar to the Hazy Mind engine.

Anyway, I went through all the tutorials and got everything set up. I even expanded on it a bit by adding my own State Manager, so I can do things like a Menu state and a Game state. But right now I'm struggling with the application of making an actual game out of the engine. In the tutorials, there's a sample driver where everything gets loaded and set up before the game is actually run. This works out all well and good, since Initialize and LoadContent are all called properly on everything.

But in an actual game, it's not realistic to just list out every single object you're going to load in Main. When you begin creating objects AFTER the game has started, Initialize and LoadContent are no longer called on those objects. Am I missing something here? Should I be putting this stuff in the constructor now? Or am I going to have to find a way to explicitly start calling Initialize and LoadContent on these newly created objects?

Thanks!
Marshall

[mikeschuld]

What you are talking about sounds like something best handled by your state manager. Each game state could have it's own object manager with lists of assets (instead of the main game class having it) and could call the needed methods when the states are loaded, unloaded, etc.

This is probably something that will be added to the tutorial engine eventually, but there has been a lot of back and forth between a few long tutorials that have been taking up most of the time lately so I don't really have a guess at when this type of functionality would be added to the main engine.

Let me know if you need any more detail on how I would do this within the state manager. It should be a pretty quick change though.