Why does my game exit immediately if I restart it after calling Exit()?

Question

When launching a game multiple times in a console, the first time this.Exit() on the game class is called, all following games do not properly run. Instead they exit immediately.

For example, if I have a function that does:

foreach(var i in options) {
  using(var game = new MyGame()) {
    game.Run();
  }
}

and the game class has

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
  if(gameTime.TotalGameTime.TotalSeconds > 3)
    this.Exit();
  base.Update(gameTime);
}

then the first instance will execute just fine (for 3 seconds), but the second will exit immediately.

How can I prevent XNA from making the second games die immediately?

Answer 1

There should only be one instance of Game created in an XNA process I believe, so that code won't work. Although you're using a 'using' directive (which will call Game.Dispose when the scope runs out), that will only clean up unmanaged resources; the game object itself, and any managed resources it holds on to won't have been disposed of by the garbage collector by the time the subsequent MyGame is constructed. I suspect it is internally checking that it is the only instance of a Game-derived class and refusing to do any work.

See this question for some more illumination on the problem.

Game is intended to be a high level object, constructed once, that activates a bunch of services for your game. There may be a way to make it clean up after itself, but I suspect you'll find your life much easier if you move your foreach (var i in options) inside the MyGame class, and spawn a secondary game-like class to do the actual per-option work.

Alternatively you could have the options loop spawn a new process for each game, but then you'd have to co-ordinate cross process to pass the option information in, and to establish when the sub-process has finished running.