Making a Scene

With my sprite abstraction layer in place I needed some larger structure that could manage groups of sprites and the application logic associated with them. What I ended up with was something I called a 'scene'. A scene would be some discrete function of the game, like a main menu, a map screen or a battle screen. Each scene manages its own sprites by registering them with the GraphicsManager and has an UpdateScene method that gets called by the main form on each game loop right before the graphics are updated in the GraphicsManager. All of this is handled by another interface called IScene.

I created a class named SampleScene which loads a single sprite into memory, my favorite blue dot, and handles the logic to move this dot with the arrow keys. When the enter key is pressed the scene tells the main form that it should load the next scene (which in this case is the exact same scene. The first scene is torn down and the next scene is created and away we go. On the screen this means that the blue dot just moves back to the starting location, but under the hood a scene has been swapped out.

Along with all this I added a few nice things here and there. Sprites and Scenes can dispose of themselves now to get their resources out of memory. This is done behind the scenes when a scene is torn down before the incoming scene is initialized. I also built out some factory classes for sprite and scene creation. Both need access to resources like the GraphicsManager to intialize properly so I wrapped all that up in the factory pattern. Requesting a new sprite or scene flows nicely now.

Quite a productive weekend!