Xna Loading Screens

Question

I'm making a 2D XNA game. I'd like to implement loading screens when stuff has to load for a while. Like when I login to an account, connect to the server, and generate worlds. I'm pretty sure it needs to be multithreaded, because I want to be able to do something like "Generating World 10%...11%...".

  GenerateWorld()
  {
       //Call StartLoading("Generating World"); or something
       //Starter generating, Updating progress...
       //End loading screen and fade into world
  }

Help appreciated, I'm new.

Answer 1

You don't need multi-threading at all, but some knowledge in parallel programming could be useful.

Do your load in batches in your game loop and you'll be fine.

Answer 2

I'd highly recommend looking at the following guide: http://www.spikie.be/blog/page/Building-a-main-menu-and-loading-screens-in-XNA.aspx

I had a look at it yesterday, and pulled out the loading screen code for a project I was working on, think it might be of help to you.

Answer 3

I wouldn't really call multithreading overkill. It at least doesn't lock up the game/system. So what I would do is have a counter for percentage, load everything in a thread, and for each item loaded increase the counter (by 1/number of items for 0-1 scale). Then, in the draw function, just have something draw current percentage. Then, once the data is finished loading, set a flag to true saying that the game has been loaded (this is important so that you do not crash the game because it wants to draw what hasn't yet been loaded).

Answer 4

Disclaimer: This is kinda off-the-cuff advice, so take it as such.

If you're trying to multi-thread, it might be overkill for a loading screen. Unless you have a cool loading screen like (I think Fallout's) install screen, where you play Arkanoid while it installs!

You can usually do this with something simple, like using a timer on a short (1 second?) interval to update the "loaded" percentage, while your main application loads what you need.

Plus, if your game is small enough, you won't even need a loading screen!

Answer 5

I've done something like this:

• A class ContentLoaderSpool that have:

  . One Dictionary keyed by the paths of the files to load, with the value as the instance of the content loaded (Texture2D, Song, Video and so);

  . One property to flag if there's some content still need to load;

  . A method asking for start loading the content. It iterates through the Dictionary and populates their values. This method works in a parallel thread with high priority. While this method is running, the main game loop continues normally.

The game loop can grab informations of the Spool, to update one progress bar or see if the entire collection of content were loaded and finally change to the next screen.