FGF: A Helper For Creating Render Targets

Posted on November 25, 2009 by John Sedlak

Before I begin this post, big thanks to Eibx and David over at the Community Forums for helping me find these methods. I have modified the CheckTexture method a bit, but its purpose remains unchanged.

As of the last FGF article, the Application class was implementing the IGame interface but was missing the ability to create a render target object on the PC and Xbox 360. For PC games this can be a troubling problem since different hardware can obviously require different formats and dimensions of render target. Rather than bake this functionality into the Application class itself, it is moved to a static helper class so that all developers can make good use of its functionality at any point in time.

To start off, a simple default creation method is included to give the basic functionality an easy access point.

using System;

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics;

namespace FocusedGames.Xna.Graphics
{
    public static class GraphicsHelper
    {
        public static RenderTarget2D CreateRenderTarget(GraphicsDevice device)
        {
            return CreateRenderTarget(
                device,
                device.PresentationParameters.BackBufferWidth,
                device.PresentationParameters.BackBufferHeight,
                1,
                device.PresentationParameters.BackBufferFormat
            );
        }

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FGF: It’s All About Abstraction

Posted on November 16, 2009 by John Sedlak

One of the major themes present in the design of FGF is abstraction of functionality from its implementation. The major reason for this is because one of the major goals of FGF is to provide functionality without forcing developers into a corner. The idea is if the base of the framework is modular and open, the rest of the framework will fall into place very easily. So I begin the implementation of FGF by fixingimproving the XNA Framework’s Game class with an abstraction of its functionality. The reason for which will become apparent when the component classes are improved at a later time.

The important question to ask here is what can a game do? We can run a game, and exit a game but also add and remove components and services. Thus the IGame interface is born (within the FocusedGames.Xna project):

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;

namespace FocusedGames.Xna
{
    public interface IGame
    {
        void Run();
        void Exit();

        Vector2 ObjectToScreen(Vector2 objectVector);
        Vector2 ScreenToObject(Vector2 screenVector);

        GraphicsDeviceManager DeviceManager { get; }

        DisplayOrientation DisplayOrientation { get; set; }
        Vector2 DisplaySize { get; set; }

        bool IsLoaded { get; }

        float TargetFrameRate { get; set; }

        ModuleCollection Modules { get; }
    }
}

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FGF: Getting Started

Posted on November 5, 2009 by John Sedlak

This series is devoted to the design and development of my framework, FGF (Focused Games Framework), and aims to cover topics like async content management, WCF services, and many more. In this first article, I cover how to setup Visual Studio 2008 for coding the framework. It is important to understand that I will be using Visual Studio Team System 2008 and thus may have features that are not available in the Express edition. It is possible to get around many of these or ignore them completely, however, so not having Team System does not mean developing FGF is impossible.

The first step is to open up the IDE and create our solution. When starting a large solution such as the one for FGF, I find it useful to create a Blank Solution so that the solution’s name can be different than that of the first project. Again, this can be worked around in Express as well as other versions of the editor.

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