Today, I went to a fish fry instead of doing work.
However, while I was at the fish fry, I had some interesting ideas for driving my main menu & story screens. I’m going to try to use XML!
The only way I’ve found so far to drive the main menu via XML is if each menu option transitions to another screen. Then, I can assign an option a new screen, and let the transition manager take care of it. However, that would mean I’d have to replace my “difficulty” menu item with an “options” menu item, and then the options screen would only have one item in it. That doesn’t seem like a great idea for my current design.
For the story screen, though, I think it’ll work exceptionally well. A story has pages, and each page has one or more lines & images on it. The lines and images will have locations & ranges, as well as content – all of which can be easily stored in the XML.
I need to do some research tomorrow, to see if there’s an easy way in XNA to get at XML files stored in the game object. In normal C#, you have to jump through a few hoops, and I hope that’s been resolved for this platform. :)
Also, after my post last night, I tried my code on the XBox. There were some issues with the timing of the GamerServicesComponent being added & used, but that was resolved with an Initialize() hack.
How exciting!
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