Once again it’s been a long time, because once again I’ve been really busy! No, I haven’t given up on the blog, so don’t worry – I really want to see this engine finished so we can all play with it. I’ve posted a number of new things, including: Content Manager tutorial: This one basically [...]

A small sample game, which is basically Space Invaders, designed to demonstrate the use of Components and GameScreens, and how to build a simple game using them and the rest of the Innovation Engine. It is available for download from the CodePlex site here: http://ig.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=37956

The Engine Constructor used in the XNA Game Engine Tutorial Series 2.0 so far is incorrect. It should actually be as follows: public Engine(GraphicsDeviceManager Graphics) { services = new ServiceContainer(); services.AddService(typeof(IGraphicsDeviceService), Graphics); services.AddService(typeof(IGraphicsDeviceManager), Graphics); this.graphicsDevice = Graphics.GraphicsDevice; content = new IEContentManager(Services); spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); this.graphicsDevice = GraphicsDevice; } In the future, the tutorials and [...]

We need to provide a way for components to load content. They can’t do it in their constructors because they may not have a GameScreen set to access the Engine’s content manager yet. To accomplish this we will add a Load() function to the Component class, which will be called (assuming the component has not [...]

XNA provides a ContentManager class that is used to load and unload content. However, we are going to create our own that caches loaded content so we only have to load an asset once to use it repeatedly, and also supports unloaded specific peaces of content (when entering a different area, for example). Add a [...]