Developer Splash Screen


The first thing that a player will see when starting this game will be the developer splash screen. Think of this as analogous to seeing the movie studio logo at the beginning of a movie. It lets the viewer know who created the wonderful media production they are about to enjoy. This splash screen could be either a static image or a short video depending on the preferences (and production capabilities) of the game developer. For the purposes of our sample game engine, we will be treating all game resources as separate files rather than building them into the executable as resources. The game engine has a method called ShowSplash , which takes a string argument holding the path to the image to be displayed. The implementation of this method will be described in Chapter 2 as part of the player interface. The method call will look like this:

 m_Engine.ShowSplash("devsplash.jpg", 8, new CGameEngine.BackgroundTask(LoadOptions)); 

This splash screen will remain displayed until a state change causes it to be replaced by something else. The ShowSplash method does not include the state change logic to transition to the next state. The primary reason for this is that time spent displaying a splash screen can be put to good use. This is a good time to preload other resources the game will need, rather than have the player wait later. My preference is to spend the time during this splash screen to load configuration and option data. This data includes the video resolution to use in the actual playing portion of the game, special-effect filter values to exclude some flashy special effects that the player s computer might not be able to support, and keyboard key mappings that let the player choose how he or she prefers to control the game.

This configuration data will be loaded using another call to an engine method ( LoadOptions ). Once the time has expired for the splash screen (say 8 seconds), or the player has pressed a key on the keyboard or clicked a mouse button, the game state will be advanced to the game splash screen state.




Introduction to 3D Game Engine Design Using DirectX 9 and C#
Introduction to 3D Game Engine Design Using DirectX 9 and C#
ISBN: 1590590813
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 98

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