2nd Sprint and GUI

GUI
This task was challenging for me since I was redoing it over, and over, and over ;-). It was about GUI interface, pop-up windows, scroll-boxes, buttons and their over, off, selected states and how all this stuff communicates among themselves. First I started with an idea that all those GUI elements can be just another screens but this unfortunately didn't work. I couldn't figure out how to make our game state management have more then 1 screen at a time. I think it is because it lists screens as states and only 1 state at a time is allowed. I found quite an interesting tutorial how to build a state machine that allows drawing multiple screens at a time and some really cool transfer-between-screens and "loading..." effects, the link is here . Unfortunately when I started implementing it I found It was over my head and even if I were able to pull it it would be like rebuilding the screen management from scratch. My final decision was to break everything in GUI classes and have GUIElement (it can be anything from button to scrollbox) that can be added on the screen and put into the screen class list as its member variable. All drawing and updates is then done by looping through their appropriate Draw and Update methods. Those GUI classes just take care of graphical updates on the screen, when anything is selected they just pass the appropriate index of selected item to its parent screen. Then it is up to the parent screen class to add any functionality and decide what to do with the selected item.



TODO:

1. Right now I am having problem with transferring between screens that its buttons doesn't remember previous state (already pressed).
2. It is missing Refresh screen method, when changing the screen resolution it doesn't update sizes appropriately
3. Functionality, it needs to be decided on the whole New Game, Load Game flow and what information save in SavePlayerData structure.
   

File Management
I already had basic code for saving, loading, deleting files from the 1st Sprint so I just created a new Player class and move all these methods there. Since I am assuming that this Player class will contain all pertinent information about the player and his/her mission (name, level, score, which ship upgrades, weapons...) it should also carry methods for saving, loading, deleting itself. I found easier to do all operations on files only and then just update screen appropriately. Also to avoid any save or delete synchronization errors when overwriting data the file is actually first deleted and then again saved but with a different file name. The file name is always different and contains a time stamp.

Conclusion
I realized (unfortunately when I was almost finished ;-)) that I am trying to reinvent the wheel. Even that I haven't found some tutorial for GUI on XNA there must be tons of information how to do it in other programming languages. I suddenly remembered that we talked in CS3505 about Design Patterns. Good programmer has some ready programming receipts in his/her bag and I probably missed this opportunity to add a new one to mine.