How to chain actions/animations together and delay their execution?
- by codinghands
I'm trying to build a simple game with a number of screens - 'TitleScreen', 'LoadingScreen', 'PlayScreen', 'HighScoreScreen' - each of which has it's own draw & update logic methods, sprites, other useful fields, etc. This works well for me as a game dev beginner, and it runs.
However, on my 'PlayScreen' I want to run some animations before the player gets control - dropping in some artwork, playing some sound effects, generally prettifying things a little. However, I'm not sure what the best way to chain animations / sound effects / other timed general events is.
I could make an intermediary screen, 'PrePlayScreen', which simply has all of this hardcoded like so:
Update(){
Animation anim1 = new Animation(.....);
Animation anim2 = new Animation(.....);
anim1.Run();
if(anim1.State == AnimationState.Complete)
anim2.Run();
if(anim2.State == AnimationState.Complete)
// Load 'PlayScreen' screen
}
But this doesn't seem so great - surely their must be a better way? I then thought, 'Hey - an AnimationManager! That'd be awesome!'. But then that creeping OOP panic set in as I thought about it some more.
If I create the Animation in my Screen, then add it to the AnimationManager (which may or may not be a GameComponent hooked up to Update/Draw), how can I get 'back' to it? To signal commands like start / end / repeat? I'd still need to keep a reference to the object in my Screen so that I could still communicate with it once it's buried in the bosom of a List in my AnimationManager. This seems bad.
I've also tried using events - call 'Update' on all the animations in the PlayScreen update loop, but crucially all of the animations have a bool flag ('Active') which determines whether they should begin. The first animation has this set to 'true', all others 'false'. On completion the first animation raises an event, which sets animation 2's bool flag to true (and so it then runs). Once animation 2 is complete another 'anim complete' event is raised, and the screen state changes.
Considering the game I'm making is basically as simple as it gets I know I'm overthinking this... it's just the paradigm shift from web - game development is making me break out in a serious case of the stupids.
