Getting Started With MHFramework 3

Though still in the early stages of development, MHFramework 3 is vastly different from its predecessors in a variety of ways.  However, those prior versions had certain strengths that I desperately want to maintain as we go forward with the engine's redesign.  One of those strengths is the simplicity of the initial setup.

One of the highest priority design goals of MHF3 is cross-platform portability between Android and PC-based platforms.  With this in mind to help guide my design decisions, the initial setup for both platforms follows a simple, three-step process, with only a slight modification to the Android version:

1. Create at least one screen.  This is done by inheriting from the engine's MHScreen class. (More on this in a future post.)
2. Define your display settings by initializing an MHVideoSettings object.
3. Pass those things into the engine along with the window in which your game app will run.  This is accomplished with a call to MHFramework.run().

Here's a PC-compatible example of a main class that accomplishes these things.

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import javax.swing.JFrame;

import com.mhframework.MHFramework;
import com.mhframework.MHScreen;
import com.mhframework.MHVideoSettings;


public class PlatformTestPCWindow
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        // Step 1:  The screen.
        MHScreen startingScreen = new TestScreen();
        
        // Step 2:  The video settings.
        MHVideoSettings displaySettings = new MHVideoSettings();
        displaySettings.displayWidth = 800;
        displaySettings.displayHeight = 480;

        // Step 3:  Run it!
        MHFramework.run(new JFrame(), startingScreen, displaySettings);
    }
}

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The Android version takes a very similar approach, but with a few additional rules:

1. The main class must inherit from the engine's MHAndroidActivity class, which is a specialization of Android's basic Activity class that adds additional support for MHF3's multithreading requirements. 
2. Rather than perform those steps in main, your program must override the Activity.onCreate() method. 
3. Since Android's orientation can be specified as portrait or landscape, this must be specified here as well.  
• Future versions may simply add the orientation constant as a field in MHVideoSettings and default it to landscape.  This way, the Android version will use the exact same three steps with no additional requirements.

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import android.content.pm.ActivityInfo;
import android.os.Bundle;

import com.mhframework.MHFramework;
import com.mhframework.MHScreen;
import com.mhframework.MHVideoSettings;
import com.mhframework.platform.android.MHAndroidActivity;

public class PlatformTestAndroid extends MHAndroidActivity
{
    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {
        // Initialize Android-specific properties.
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        this.setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE);
        
        // Step 1:  The screen.
        MHScreen startingScreen = new TestScreen();
        
        // Step 2:  The video settings.
        MHVideoSettings displaySettings = new MHVideoSettings();
        displaySettings.displayWidth = 800;
        displaySettings.displayHeight = 480;

        // Step 3:  Run it!
        MHFramework.run(this, startingScreen, displaySettings);
    }
}

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