encompass-cs-docs/content/getting_started/project_structure.md

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Project Structure 2019-05-22T12:19:55-07:00 15

TODO: CREATE AN ENCOMPASS-FNA STARTER TEMPLATE

Structuring your project is a crucial component of keeping your Encompass development sane. Let's review how an Encompass project is typically structured.

If we look at the Encompass/FNA starter project, it looks like this:

(screenshot goes here))

The top-level of your game will be located in the (GameName)Game.cs file. FNA's top level functions are described as follows.

LoadContent runs once after the initial setup is done. I usually like to put my initialization and, you guessed it, content loading code in here.

UnloadContent is where you clean up after yourself so the game can dispose of itself properly.

Update(GameTime gameTime) gets called once per frame. It's where the update code goes. For Encompass there probably won't be anything in here except World.Update(gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds).

Draw also gets called once per frame, after Update. All rendering logic should go in here. For Encompass you'll probably just put World.Draw() in here but there might be some externalities as well.

The rest of it is pretty straightforward. Put your sprites and sound effects and such in the Content folder. Define your components in the Components folder, your engines in the Engines folder, your messages in the Messages folder, and your renderers in the Renderers folder. (Again, we'll start getting into exactly how to define these in a minute.)

Finally, a quick note about Helpers. I like to use classes with static methods for common behaviors that will be useful for many different engines, for example a Color class with a HSVToRGB conversion function. Be careful not to abuse helpers. If your helpers aren't static, that is usually a sign that the behavior belongs in an engine instead.