I am trying to implement a State Machine into my Android game (note that it is not a game that needs to be constantly redrawn with a UI as it just works using standard Android Activity structure). I have found this example below of how you can implement a State Machine with a switch statement:
main() {
while(true) {
collectInput(); // deal with common code for filling in keyboard queues, determining mouse positions, etc.
preBookKeeping(); // do any other work that needs constant ticks, like updating streaming/sound/physics/networking receives, etc.
runLogic(); // see below
postBookKeeping(); // again any stuff that needs ticking, but would want to take into account what happened in runLogic this frame, e.g. animation/particles/networking transmit, etc
drawEverything(); // any actual rendering actions you need to take
}
}
runLogic() {
// this is where you actually have a state machine
switch (state) {
case WaitingForInput:
// look at the collected input and see if any of it is actionable
case WaitingForOpponent:
// look at the input and warn the player that they are doing stuff that isn't going to work right now e.g. a "It's not your turn!" notification.
// otherwise, use input to do things that might be valid when it's not the player's turn, like pan around the map.
case etc:
// a real game would have a ton more actual states, including transition states, start/end/options screens, etc.
}
}
Whilst transitioning my game from the loop below to the State Machine, I am having issues. If say from this main game Activity, I launch another Activity in order to ask the player a question (happens inside playTurn()), I will then obviously utilise onActivityResult() and return the player's answer to the main game Activity. How should I handle the return of the player's answer and allow the code to then continue running in playTurn(), inside the main playGame() loop, without breaking the while loop flow? The only way I actually can figure out is by utilising a while loop inside playTurn() that simply keeps looping whilst the answer is 0 but that seems horrifically wasteful. Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated!
public void playGame() {
initialise();
boolean finished = false;
while (!finished) {
playTurn();
// Check if there is a winner after each turn is played
boolean winner = winner();
if (winner) {
finished = true;
}
}
}
