Hi All,

I've had a nose around these forums, Googled, and read the two books I've got on XNA, but nowhere can I find a decent description of XNA's GameComponent lifecycle.

In what order do Initialize, Update, Draw and LoadContent get called? The MS reference for LoadContent said that it should be used for loading any graphics-specific stuff; however when I do this my component's Draw method is called before LoadContent (which seems a little strange!) and is therefore throwing nullpointers because it can't find references to any of the textures I've tried to load in.

I'm writing my code like this - is this 'best practice'?

Constructor - creating instances of things that don't rely on external sources, or instances that will ask for external resources later

Initialise - getting references to Services (SpriteBatches, ContentManagers etcetera)

LoadContent - making calls on those services I've now got references to in order to load in textures and the like

Deej:

In what order do Initialize, Update, Draw and LoadContent get called? The MS reference for LoadContent said that it should be used for loading any graphics-specific stuff; however when I do this my component's Draw method is called before LoadContent (which seems a little strange!) and is therefore throwing nullpointers because it can't find references to any of the textures I've tried to load in.

I just tested it, using Console.WriteLine in the appropriate methods of a DrawableGameComponent:
Load Content
Initialize
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Draw
Update
Update
Draw
Update
Draw

It seems odd that LoadContent comes before Initialize. The double updates were only happening when I changed windows.

BShields:

It seems odd that LoadContent comes before Initialize. The double updates were only happening when I changed windows.

base.Initialize calls LoadContent on the component.  So depending on where your WriteLine call is compared to base.Initialize, you'll get a printout that puts LoadContent first.

Nick Gravelyn:

Where did you stick those Console.WriteLine calls? Before or after the call to base.Initialize in your game component? Can you post up the code for the Initialize and LoadContent methods you had? Initialize almost has to be called first as it's the base.Initialize call down to DrawableGameComponent.Initialize that actually triggers the call to LoadContent if I'm not mistaken.