Description:
This sample shows how to manage the transitions among menus
and gameplay states.
Sample Overview
This sample provides a simple game screen management system,
ready to be used as a starting point for games on Windows Phone, Xbox 360, or
Windows. Additionally the sample includes example games for Windows Phone as
well as Windows/Xbox 360, showing how you can build different, targeted
experiences for each platform while using the same base code. Each experience
is different to emphasize the versatility of the core library to create
different experiences.
The ScreenManager class is a reusable component that
maintains a stack of one or more GameScreen instances. It coordinates the
transitions from one screen to another, and takes care of routing user input to
whichever screen is on top of the stack.
Each screen class (including the actual gameplay, which is
just another screen) derives from GameScreen. This provides Update,
HandleInput, and Draw methods, plus some logic for managing the transition state.
GameScreen doesn't actually implement any transition rendering effects,
however: it merely provides information such as "you are currently 30% of
the way through transitioning off," leaving it up to the derived screen
classes to do something sensible with that information in their drawing code.
This makes it easy for screens to implement different visual effects on top of
the same underlying transition infrastructure.
The sample also includes functionality for handling
tombstoning and fast app switching on Windows Phone. The ScreenManager works
with an IScreenFactory to store away a list of the current screens and bring
them back when the game resumes. Each GameScreen has methods for Activate and
Deactivate that can be used to retrieve and store additional state about the
game so you can bring the user back exactly where they were.
Downloads
If you have found this sample helpful, or would like to share anything regarding this sample, please comment below. Also, check out this tutorial here on how to add multiple menu columns to the game state management sample.
