Panzer Redux: WinRT

I was thinking of porting the Windows7 game that I created onto Windwos RT.  Since they are both XAML based, I thought it would be a snap.  I thought wrong.  Part of the problem is that I wrote the original game with poor architecture.  The other part of the problem is that Windows RT makes it hard to port existing code.

I first wanted to separate the game interface from the core game functions.  I created a new project and brought in all of the non-graphical components:

The problem is that every actor seems to have a dependency on the Game class.  For example:

So I need to break the dependencies between these factories and their implementation.  I decided on Property Injection versus constructor injection as a matter of convention because I am not sure on the number of dependencies for each factory and I hate really long constructors.  So my refactoring looks like:

public class ArmyFactory
{
    public ScenarioFactory ScenarioFactory { get; set; }
    public UnitFactory UnitFactory { get; set; }

    public ArmyInfo CreateArmy(int scenarioId, int sideId)
    {
        ArmyInfo armyInfo = new ArmyInfo();
        armyInfo.SideId = sideId;

        List<ScenarioUnit> scenarioUnits = ScenarioFactory.ScenarioUnitFactory.GetScenarioUnits(scenarioId);
        foreach (ScenarioUnit scenarioUnit in scenarioUnits)
        {
            int unitId = 0;
            if (scenarioUnit.SideId == sideId)
            {
                armyInfo.Units.Add(UnitFactory.CreateUnit(unitId, scenarioUnit));
                unitId++;
            }
        }

        return armyInfo;
    }
}

I then was confronted with the fact that my game engine has dependencies on Windows Phone:

Looking at the original code:

So I need a way of loading from an XML file – or do I?  What if the EquipmentClass data was stored in something other than XML?  Do I really want my factory breaking?  I then looked at ScenarioTile – I had loaded data from either a web service or from an XML file.

I then realized that the factory is a translator –>  In goes XML, SOAP, ADO.NET recordset, whatever, out always pops the instantiated objects.  XML was used because that is the de-facto standard for Win Phones.  I also see that my Lookup data is in XML.  Therefore, what I need is a platform-agnostic XML Stream Reader.  Unfortunately, that is not in the cards: Windows Phone has its implementation, System.IO has its implementation, and Windows 8 RT has its implementation.   I then refactored the factory to take in an XML file of a certain structure and spit out the classes.  All of the implementation that is platform specific I removed.

So where do I implement the actual XML load?  In the calling application.  Windows Phone 7.x uses XElement, WindowsRT does, and I have to assume Windows Phone 8 does too.  I wonder if all platforms shared the same serialization implementation? 

Ugh!  looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinkin…