Scene mechanism in Gorgon Library help with rapid game development.

In games there are multiple scenes or stages. Designing switching mechanisms between these scenes require time. Specially, in smaller games, this development time becomes significant. Scene system is designed to remove the need to code scene switching and management work, speeding up the development of games.

SceneManager is the manager of the system. It is also a Window and a Runner. Before creating a manager, Gorgon Library modules should be initialized using Initialize() function. A manager itself is not very useful. In order to have any functionality, you need to create scene classes that are derived from Scene and add them to the manager using SceneManager::NewScene function. While adding the scene to the manager, you should specify a SceneID, this number will be used to switch between scenes. Once the scenes are ready and the initial scene is activated using SceneManager::SwitchScene function, you can call SceneManager::Run function to transfer execution to the manager. The manager will call Scene::doframe and Scene::render functions of the active scene and then will call NextFrame() function to handle frame tasks such as rendering and input handling.

A scene could use Scene::parent member to access to its manager. However, if your workflow includes running scenes without a manager, scenes should check whether parent member is nullptr. All scenes have precreated layers that will be managed automatically. Thus you should use these layers for graphics and mouse input. Once the scene is deactivated, these layers will be made invisible. Additionally, inactive layers will not receive doframe calls, thus will effectively be paused.