Virtual Realm

XNA Game Framework

Saturday, June 09 2007 - gse, xna, game-framework

About a month ago I was looking for a small project to work on, as I needed something to fill in some time. When on the Creators Forums a user posted a question about the Starter Kits and what they wanted to see next. What was talked about was a starting base that could be used as a base for new applications. This base had to be almost complete in functions allowing the user to work on the actual game play of their application.

So I decided to see what I could come up with, but in the process of talking another community Member offered to give me a hand in the project. In the beginning we have decided to start with only some simple functions and then build on them. In the first release of the code to the www.codeplex.com/GameFramework site we have added the following systems to the project.

• Simple Game State System, based off the Game State Sample from the Creators Site
• Menu Transitions from Shawn's Blog Posts, which have been integrated into the screen system. Now to use the different transitions you would add a parameter to the constructor of the menu screen which would tell the engine what transition to use.
• An Audio System, provided by EvilDed (EvilDed's Blog). This Audio system will give you the ability to add background music to the menus as well as the game screens, it also adds sound effects to the menu transitions and page swaps as well as sound effects when changing different menu options.
• A Frame Rate Game Component, that was original in the beginning but after Shawn's post on FPS Counters I have made some changes to mine. This frame rate component will allow you to display the FPS of your application to the Debug Window, the Windows Title, or now the Game Screens. At the same time I have adjusted the game component to allow the component to be drawn last in the order so that it will be drawn onto of everything.

But this is not all; I have plans to keep working on the system and make it grow into something that can be used as a starting point for lots of different applications. We also plan on adding some helper classes that will be able to assist with your projects.

I did plan on adding my Storage component to the application, but the current code is not playing nice and I wanted to get a release done. Hopefully I will get it working this week and add it to the Base. If you go through the code you will see that I have left some of it in the base, but it is giving me some errors that I would like to fix. Also the current system is not asynchronous. So since the Storage was not complete I am going to stop on the current system and work on the asynchronous stuff.

The plan for the code is to release the final versions or releases as Starter Kits so that you can install them and use them as templates, just like the default applications that ship with the GSE Systems.

Some of the things that I plan on adding to the project are as follows.

• Credits system, with different effects for displaying the text
• A Keyboard Entry Screen/Component that would allow the user to use a controller to enter text, simular to the Blade, Maybe I could use the one from the XNAResources.com site.
• Finalize my Storage component.

Anyway for now the code is complete and works well, if anyone has suggestions or feedback please post as this will determine if we decide to continue with the project.

You Can download the code from the CodePlex Project Site Game Framework