Monday, November 28, 2005

XML Fun!

So,

Its been a while! What have i been upto you may ask, well apart from shifting my life around the country i have been wrapping up our lovely engine into a more presentable game.

As with most of the information in the game we have decided to keep all the menu info in an external XML file, this allows for ease of editing, flexibility and hopefully reusability in any future projects we undertake. An example of the menu XML for the tech demo:

<menus>
<menu>
<title>Main</title>
<orientation>horizontal</orientation>
<x>225</x>
<y>200</y>
<spacing>10</spacing>
<option>
<text>Start Beta</text>
<func>startBeta</func>
<param></param>
</option>
<option>
<text>Credits</text>
<func>gotoMenu</func>
<param>Credits</param>
</option>
</menu>
</menus>

This is parsed and converted to an object structure as the game is displaying the loading screen. The menus are then created on the fly in the right positions and orientations, displaying the right text! When a button is pressed it then calls the appropriate function within the MenuManager Class and passes the appropriate parameters. I have also been working on a new class called HUDManager, this retrieves all the current information about the race (for example, lap times, positions etc) and displays it on the screen... At the moment this is all done in text format but that will be replaced with some flashy graphics in a later release..

In other news we have been largly bug fixing since the last post, Jon is still working on the broken collision response while i have been tidying up code all over the game in order to get it ready to show you all! Thanks for the support - keep checking back (or subscribe to our Atom feed!) - were getting closer!