Where have all the transitions gone?

Originally posted to Shawn Hargreaves Blog on MSDN, Thursday, March 15, 2007

I'm a bad person.

I said I was going to talk about transitions, and I meant it at the time.

But then I got all excited about the launch of the new XNA website, so I took some time to talk about the stuff there first.

Today I sat down to start writing about transitions. I put together a list of topics for a series of probably 5 or 6 posts. I started writing the first one.

I immediately realized that before I could usefully discuss transitions, I needed an infrastructure for handling multiple overlapping screens, probably based on the design Eli blogged about a while back. I started coding that up, only to notice that a usable system actually needs quite a bit of code to handle things like routing input to the active screen, or the difference between screens that transition off to make room for a temporary overlay versus ones that are going away for good.

All of a sudden this was starting to look more like a sample program than a blog post. And strangely enough, there is a sample about game state management in our list of upcoming work items. So I decided to put my blog series on hold until we can get that written and released.

I do still want to blog about some specific transition techniques, but that will have to wait until we have a sample I can use as a starting point.

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