pausing - How do I pause an XNA game?

I'm trying to implement pausing by following this tutorial. The tutorial recommends essentially this as the implementation:

if (!paused) {
    Simulate(gameTime);
}

How does this work? What does Simulate mean here?

Answer

It's just a simple way to wrap your entire Update method in a conditional, without mixing the pausing logic with your game's updating logic.

So instead of:

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
    if(!paused)
    {
        // Lots and lots of code!

    }
}

You can have:

private void Simulate(GameTime gameTime)
{
    // Lots and lots of code!
}

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)

{
    if(!paused)
    {
        Simulate(gameTime);
    }
}

Of course, if you would prefer to express it as "continue the game like normal", you could also do this:

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{

    if(paused)
        return;

    // Lots and lots of code!
}

These all do the same thing. Which method you choose to do it is simply a matter of taste. Basically what the tutorial is telling you is:

• Determine if your game should be paused and store that in a variable (ie: bool paused)


• If it is paused, skip over the code that is responsible for updating your game's state (essentially freezing it in time, ie: "pausing" it.)