Full game tutorial - part 5. Creating splash screen scene:

Okay, we have covered all the  "management" classes, so finally we can move onto the next step, which is creating our game itself, by creating scenes obviously, from what you could see on our class diagram posted in the previous parts of this article, the first scene will be our splash screen, we will display a little badge while loading the menu resources. It means, player will not be forced to see a black screen while loading resources, first we load ONLY the splash screen resources then display the splash scene and finally load different resources, quite simple.

1. Loading splash resources:

• put your splash graphic file inside assets/gfx/ folder.
• call this file splash.png
• open the ResourcesManager class, and lets load this graphic. Firstly create fields for the texture region, and splash texture.

public ITextureRegion splash_region;
private BitmapTextureAtlas splashTextureAtlas;

• Load our splash file, inside the previously created loadSplashScreen() method.

BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.setAssetBasePath("gfx/");
splashTextureAtlas = new BitmapTextureAtlas(activity.getTextureManager(), 256, 256, TextureOptions.BILINEAR);
splash_region = BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.createFromAsset(splashTextureAtlas, activity, "splash.png", 0, 0);
splashTextureAtlas.load();

• also lets prepare the method responsible for unloading our splash texture (which will be executed after completing the process of loading game resources and switching from the splash scene to the menu scene) Do it inside the previously created unloadSplashScreen()

splashTextureAtlas.unload();
splash_region = null;

Done, we've prepared the code responsible for loading/unloading splash resources, now lets move onto creating the splash scene, more below.

2. Creating the splash scene:

• create a new class called SplashScene
• as an extension, use the previously created abstract class BaseScene.
• you will be forced by eclipse to add unimplemented methods (from our superclass)

package com.matimdev.scene;

import org.andengine.engine.camera.Camera;
import org.andengine.entity.sprite.Sprite;
import org.andengine.opengl.util.GLState;

import com.matimdev.base.BaseScene;
import com.matimdev.manager.SceneManager.SceneType;

/**
 * @author Mateusz Mysliwiec
 * @author www.matim-dev.com
 * @version 1.0
 */
public class SplashScene extends BaseScene
{
    @Override
    public void createScene()
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void onBackKeyPressed()
    {

    }

    @Override
    public SceneType getSceneType()
    {

    }

    @Override
    public void disposeScene()
    {

    }
}

@Override
public SceneType getSceneType()
{
    return SceneType.SCENE_SPLASH;
}

• create a new field for our splash sprite:

private Sprite splash;

• lets initialize this sprite, inside createScene() method:

splash = new Sprite(0, 0, resourcesManager.splash_region, vbom)
{
    @Override
    protected void preDraw(GLState pGLState, Camera pCamera) 
    {
       super.preDraw(pGLState, pCamera);
       pGLState.enableDither();
    }
};
        
splash.setScale(1.5f);
splash.setPosition(400, 240);
attachChild(splash);

• next step, handle disposing the scene, do it inside the disposeScene() method:
  

@Override
public void disposeScene()
{
    splash.detachSelf();
    splash.dispose();
    this.detachSelf();
    this.dispose();
}

This will dispose of the splash sprite, and detach it from the scene. Okay, our splash scene is done, now we just have to initialize it inside our activity, more below.

3. Initializing our splash scene:

• open our SceneManager class, lets create method responsible for initializing scene. In the parameter we will use OnCreateSceneCallback, because we will need it in the activity.

public void createSplashScene(OnCreateSceneCallback pOnCreateSceneCallback)
{
    ResourcesManager.getInstance().loadSplashScreen();
    splashScene = new SplashScene();
    currentScene = splashScene;
    pOnCreateSceneCallback.onCreateSceneFinished(splashScene);
}

• We also will create method responsible for disposing splash scene (to dispose it when it will not be longer needed, which means after we successfully loaded menu resources)

private void disposeSplashScene()
{
    ResourcesManager.getInstance().unloadSplashScreen();
    splashScene.disposeScene();
    splashScene = null;
}

• execute the createSplashScene() method inside onCreateScene in your Activity.

public void onCreateScene(OnCreateSceneCallback pOnCreateSceneCallback) throws IOException
{
    SceneManager.getInstance().createSplashScene(pOnCreateSceneCallback);
}

• perform certain tasks while displaying splash (inside onPopulateScene in your Activity)

public void onPopulateScene(Scene pScene, OnPopulateSceneCallback pOnPopulateSceneCallback) throws IOException
{
    mEngine.registerUpdateHandler(new TimerHandler(2f, new ITimerCallback() 
    {
            public void onTimePassed(final TimerHandler pTimerHandler) 
            {
                mEngine.unregisterUpdateHandler(pTimerHandler);
                // load menu resources, create menu scene
                // set menu scene using scene manager
                // disposeSplashScene();
                // READ NEXT ARTICLE FOR THIS PART.
            }
    }));
    pOnPopulateSceneCallback.onPopulateSceneFinished();
}