Custom XNA Game loop in Windows

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to manage the whole game loop manually in a Windows game, without using the regular Game Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game class.

The reason for this is using the regular Game class causes some stuttering in my game. Not much, but because of the specific nature of the game it is still quite visible.

After trying a bunch of different settings (vsync, fixedtimestep, various framerates etc.) I decided to try write my own Game class to have full control of the timing. I am not sure that will fix it, but at least this way I have full control.

Basically I need to:

Set up the game window
In a loop: Do all rendering as usual, and then flush the result to the screen, manage backbuffers etc.

Anyone knows how to do this? It sounds quite easy in fact, but could not find any documentation on how to do it.

Not sure what I am doing wrong, but I have the following code (just for testing, timing will be handled differently), and the loop will run for a little while then stop. Once I pass my mousepointer over the window the loop will run for a little while again.

    private void Application_Idle(object pSender, EventArgs pEventArgs)
    {
        Thread.Sleep(500);
        //Message message;
        //while (!PeekMessage(out message, IntPtr.Zero, 0, 0, 0))
        {
            gametime.update();
            Update(gametime);
            Draw(gametime);
            GraphicsDevice.Present();
        }
    }

If enabling the "while PeekMessage", the loop will run continuously, but ignoring the sleep and also stopping when the mouse is moving over the window. Not sure what is going on here...

I think optimally I would just want to do something simple like this in the main render loop:

    while (alive)
    {
      Thread.Sleep(100);
      gametime.update();
      Update(gametime);
      Draw(gametime);
      GraphicsDevice.Present();
    }

But in this case the window remains blank, as it seems the window is not actually being redrawn with the new content. I tried a form.Refresh(), but still no go... Any ideas?

Custom XNA Game loop in Windows

1 Answers