Handling game states for Android

Question

Currently developing a game for Android. I went through a tutorial to get sprites, loop, etc. up and running, and it all works fine. The way it is currently set up is that Main creates a canvas, the canvas then runs a thread which has the while loop calling update() and display() functions in the canvas class. All of the game code and classes are essentially called from the canvas.

My question is, how do I expand this to include multiple screens/states, like menus, level selection, options, etc?

Answer 1

It's probably not appropriate to have Canvas be the controller of everything. You probably want to create a Canvas and hand it to something else to draw into.

The way I'd set it up would be something along these lines:

static public void Main() {
   InputGatherer input = new InputGatherer();
   GameSimulation sim = new GameSimulation();
   Renderer renderer = new Renderer();

   // the renderer will internally create a canvas,
   // which is irrelevant to the outside world.

   boolean done = false;

   while (!done) {
      input.Update();
      sim.Process(input);
      sim.Render(renderer);
   }
}