I know I've promised tutorials on AngelXNA, and I actually have the first one written, but I've been distracted by crunch on my current project and don't feel comfortable just posting the first portion without more to follow. In addition, the first tutorial feels way too long, so I'm hoping to add some minor changes to Angel to make getting started even easier, specifically by setting up GameManager and default screens in ClientGame, rather than forcing you to make them yourself.
But enough about that, this post is about rendering.
Angel is really nice in that it makes a lot of things really simple and really transparent. With a few exceptions, everything does what you expect. There are very few pre-conditions for any given call in Angel, so you don't have to worry about whether you've set up X or Y before calling things, or worry that calls will fail because objects weren't in the right state. That just doesn't exist In Angel. With that mind, I'm looking for a way to add a piece of complexity and functionality to Angel without sacrificing the external simplicity.
In AngelXNA, all actors render as a rectangle by default (we didn't port over circles from Angel C++), so by just putting an actor in the scene, you get something rendering. If you want to make it a sprite, you call Actor.SetSprite or (simpler) Actor.Sprite = "ContentFile". Animations follow a similar pattern, loading a sequence of files using Actor.LoadSpriteFrames (or, again, you can use Actor.Sprite = "ContentFile_001" and it will automatically load the sequence). Then you can play the animation sequence using Actor.PlaySpriteAnimation.
The problem is, now, I want to add two additional render paths, one for rendering static and animated sprite sheets, and one that allows you to specify and load multiple named animations (so you could say Acor.PlaySpriteanimation("Jump")). This is easily done by either inheriting from Renderable or Actor, but inheriting from Renderable loses all of the functionality in Actor, and inheriting from Actor means I can't use these render paths in other sub classes of Actor (namely PhysicsActor). In addition, if these render paths were reusable *outside* of actor, it might make alleviate some problems we've had adding things as Actors that aren't just to get their rendering properties.
So my question is, how do I make this simple? One option is to just add more methods and properties. Actor.SetSpriteSheet(), Actor.SpriteSheet, Actor.LoadSpriteSheetAnim() etc. This does have the benefit of being consistent, but doesn't make those render paths reusable. I could create an IRenderPath interface and have one for each render path, using SetRenderPath to assign a specific render path to an Actor and remap the current functions to creating those render paths. In addition, it means the SpriteSheetRenderPath could make use of a reusable SpriteSheet for both tilled maps as well as character animations. This, however, I feel makes Angel overly complicated. Maybe some combination of the two makes more sense?
I feel like I've spent way too much time thinking about this, and would love to get it implemented, hopefully soon.