Engineering By: Amanda Chaffin
Code Review By: Jason Hardman
DLL and Docs By: Amanda Chaffin and Jason Hardman
Summary:
The HUD DLL is an extensible heads up display for XNA platform games that can be used for any type of single player game. Self contained, users merely add the DLL, a couple of references, some method calls and the HUD appears on the screen, ready to go. Of course, you will still need to change the graphics, the text, and build in math for things like the health bar but this system is easily integrated into any XNA game of any type.
Download:
The zip files for the HUD
The Demo project: Requires XNA, Visual Studios, and DirectX SDK to run
All instructions that follow will be based on your use of the game1.cs class (which is renamed to HUDDemo in my images. The first thing that you need to do is open your game1.cs class and add your using statement as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Using Statement
Oh, but there is so much more to do!
After you have added the using statement, you have to declare the HUD, a viewport, and a string with the CurrentDirectory location in it (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Variable Declaration
Now, drop down to your LoadContent() method in your game1 file (or whatever your top level class is) and initialize your variables (see Figure 5). The reason that we have to initialize in LoadContent() instead of in the traditional Initialize() is because we need the graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport to exist, which it does not exist until after all the Initialization() calls have finished.
You need to get the viewport from the GraphicsDevice, add the file name of the HUD xml file to the filename string, and then declare the new HUD, passing in the game, the game’s spriteBatch, the viewport, and the filename (which, if you did a plus equals [+= ] and put the HUD.xml file in the correct location, will allow the HUD to find the file in the debug folder – don’t worry, this does work on an Xbox as well).
Figure 5: Initialize Content
The last thing that you need to do is tell the HUD to draw itself so drop down to your Draw call and call the HUD’s draw call (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Draw Call
Hit RUN and you should see something like Figure 7.
Figure 7: The Game window with the HUD Displaying
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