MonoGame - WinForm for homescreen?

Question

I'm starting a project with monogame. I've made games with MonoGame before, but I felt the switching between multiple forms and monogame was clunky. For example I had a homescreen with buttons to Play, Hiscores & Quit. So I had forms for the homescreen and the hiscores. And then when you clicked Play the actualy MonoGame game would open.

Am I supposed to create everything in MonoGame? Or do I use panels in a single Form?

Creating everything inside MonoGame should be your preferred approach, because it makes the game (if nothing else) platform independent. As you wrote, switching between windows forms doesn't provide the best gaming experience. — vgru, Nov 27 '15 at 12:48

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '15 at 15:03

What I did to make it easier for myself is to make a class called "Screen", and just make a List<Screen> that holds all the different screens, so now, all I have to do to switch screen is set "Visible" to false or true on the screens I want to show or hide.

Here is part of how that class looks

public class Screen
{
    public int ID;
    public string Name;
    public List<Form> Forms = new List<Form>();
    public List<Label> Labels = new List<Label>();
    public List<Button> Buttons = new List<Button>();
    public List<Textbox> Textboxes = new List<Textbox>();
    public List<EViewport> Viewports = new List<EViewport>();
    public bool Visible;

    // and a bunch of functions to add forms, buttons, do events, etc
    // when adding a control, it's important that it is set to the right viewport

    public Button AddButton(int _ID, string _Name, Texture2D _Sprite, int _Width, int _Height, Vector2 _Position, EViewport _Viewport, string _Text = "", bool _Visible = false)
    {
        Buttons.Add(new Button(_ID, _Name, _Sprite, _Width, _Height, new Vector2(_Position.X, _Position.Y), _Text, _Visible));
        Button getButton = Buttons[Buttons.Count - 1];
        getButton.ParentScreen = this;
        getButton.ParentViewport = _Viewport;
        return getButton;
    }

    public void Draw(SpriteBatch _spriteBatch, SpriteFont font, GameTime gameTime, Textbox focusedTextbox)
    {
        if (Visible)
        {
            // Draw only if screen is visible (this is not the full Draw function btw)
            for(int j = 0; j < Viewports.Count; j++)
            {
               for(int i = 0; i < Buttons.Count; i++)
               {
                   if(Buttons[i].ParentViewport.ID == Viewports[j].ID) // then draw
               }
            }
        }
    }
}

So basically all I do is add buttons, forms and viewports (because on my main menu I only need one viewport, but in-game I need 3 different viewports (one for game screen, one for UI and one for the chat) and then change their visibility like this:

storage.GetScreenByName("GameScreen").Visible = true;

(storage is just a singleton class that holds the sprite objects and screens in my game)

Oh, by the way, here's my EViewport class:

public class EViewport
{
    /* Extended Viewport */
    public Viewport _Viewport;
    public Screen ParentScreen = new Screen();
    public int ID;
    public string Name;
    public bool AllowResize;
    public int MaxWidth;
    public int MaxHeight;
    public int MinHeight;
    public float AspectRatio { get { return (float)MaxWidth / (float)MaxHeight; } }

    public EViewport()
    {
        ID = -1;
    }

    public EViewport(int _ID, string _Name, int x, int y, int width, int height, bool _AllowResize = false, int _MinHeight = 0)
    {
        ID = _ID;
        Name = _Name;
        _Viewport = new Viewport(x, y, width, height);
        AllowResize = _AllowResize;
        MinHeight = _MinHeight;
        MaxWidth = width;
        MaxHeight = height;
    }

    public bool HasParentScreen()
    {
        return (ParentScreen.ID != -1);
    }

}

I hope this helps, feel free to ask questions regarding how to implement such a system.

MonoGame - WinForm for homescreen?

1 Answers1