Question

I’m making a game for my final project in an XNA class I’m taking, it’s going to be a FPS. In order to generate enemies, I figured that I could write a class that imports a model and defines the random size and placement of the “Enemy”, as well as his movements and actions. I would then call that class from my Game.cs file. However, I’m having some difficulty with this.

My main issue is that I’m not sure where/how to call the Enemy (which is a snowman) in the Game file.

Here’s what I have for the Snowmen.cs (enemy) class

public class Snowmen : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game
{
    private Camera  cam = new Camera();

    Model snowMan;
    Matrix[] snowManMatrix;

    protected override void LoadContent()
    {
        snowMan = Content.Load<Model>( "Models\\snowman" );
        snowManMatrix = new Matrix[ snowMan.Bones.Count ];
        snowMan.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo( snowManMatrix );
    }

    public void DrawSnowMan(Model model, GameTime gameTime) 
    {
        foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Meshes) 
        {
            Matrix world, scale, translation;

            scale = Matrix.CreateScale(0.02f, 0.02f, 0.02f);
            translation = Matrix.CreateScale(0.0f, 0.7f, -4.0f);

            world = scale * translation;

         foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects)
         {
            effect.World = snowManMatrix[mesh.ParentBone.Index] * world;

            effect.View = cam.viewMatrix;
            effect.Projection = cam.projectionMatrix;
            effect.EnableDefaultLighting();
         }

           mesh.Draw();
         }
    }

    protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
    {
        DrawSnowMan( snowMan, gameTime ); 
        base.Draw(gameTime);
    }
}

As of right now, My Game1.cs file is a functional skybox and also contains LoadContent() and Draw() methods. Is the enemy class completely unnecessary?

Answer 1

If you only have snowmen than this is fine. When you add other enemies, or similar objects then adding a Parent class such as Enemy is useful both structurally, and it allows you to centralize your code and reduce/eliminate duplicate code.