The Ramblings of a Hazy Mind

All of the tutorials have been updated to work with the new XNA 4.0 CTP! As the HiDef profile is not yet available in the CTP, I cannot completely finish the postprocessing tutorial #8 because the GetBackBufferData method is only supported in the HiDef profile. Once an update or the release happens the PDFs will be uploaded to reflect the changes.

All of the tags in the svn repository have already been updated (except #8) so if you want to get an early look at the changes feel free to check out a copy from http://code.google.com/p/hmengine-xna/

I’m thinking hard about getting another tutorial out the door for the 4.0 release. The two previous ones I was attempting to get going have become a big complicated mess and not something I’d really feel comfortable trying to release as a tutorial (it’s more like a paper for a big graphics conference or something…) so I’ll keep thinking and see if I can’t come up with something that fits well into the tutorial format and maybe takes advantage of some new features in the 4.0 API.

On a somewhat related note, I got one of those new XBox 360 250GB editions, and it really is as whisper quiet as they have been advertising.

Well, the group that I am sort of an official part of now has gotten a new launcher that clones the functionality of the built in nook launcher but with the additions of being able to reorder the applications and to add more applications of which currently consist of:

• nookBrowser – a simple browser application
• nookLibrary – a replacement for the “my library” application that has more sorting and search options
• trook – a free ebook downloader, feed reader, and application installer (these will be made into individual apps soon)

All in all things are moving along pretty fast. I have not done much of the major coding yet but have taken over a large part of the standardization and integration of the separate projects. I’m hoping to get more directly involved in coding some things now that i have everything in a more easily accessible setup for people new to nook development (which is pretty much everyone right now)

So I just got my new nook and started to do some research on writing some apps for the thing and came across this blog post and this wiki post that help get the thing set up and running in the Android SDK emulator. The whole process was a bit complicated, but once I got the thing working on the Ubuntu side of things it was a simple trick of replacing the same file on windows and it ran perfectly there as well.

The only shortfall for me (who does most of my graphics development in DirectX technologies) is that because Android is Linux based, it only handles OpenGL, although the SDK does have some pretty easy quick hooks into the API so I may have to branch out a bit. We’ll see where it goes.

So I have been experimenting with WPF lately a bit and throwing around a lot of XAML and decided to put together something worth a damn out of my new knowledge and skills and have settled on a small data driven application for homebrew recipes. I have seen in the past a BeerXML format that a few people have worked on (very outdated now but a good idea at least) that I will probably also add to or rewrite to be more up to date with current XML standards and methods. It should be a good learning experience in putting together xml schemas as well as that is another area of Computer Science I have not yet delved into.

I’m using the Entity Framework for my DAL right now and it seems to be working out fairly well (at least in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta, which I hear has better EF versions going on). I’ll keep some progress reports coming. At the moment I just have a simple UI with login/register, add/edit recipes, and the ability to view all recipes or just your own. More to come.

All of the tutorials have been fully updated and the source tags checked in for the changes implemented to help better deal with the multitouch device. The new architecture of the IHMComponent library should help make a lot of things easier to implement later on (or now if you found the functionality lacking before.)

Basically the engine is put together in the same manner as before, but with a lot more HMComponents to allow for more flexibility in putting together objects to be managed by the engine (like a Loadable, Updatable, Renderable HMInputDevice).

Now its on to really getting this multitouch project going!

A lot of people don’t think it is possible to have winforms items (like buttons and dropdowns) in an XNA application, but I am here to prove them wrong. There is a ridiculously simple method of adding controls to your XNA application INSIDE the XNA window without too much hassle – as long as you are ok with coding up the items by hand.

One downfall is that this won’t work on the Xbox 360 since System.Windows.Forms is not included in the things XNA can render, but these types of UIs aren’t really the kind that would work well on an Xbox anyway.

Here is my method of adding the controls and a screenshot of the app running:

 protected override void Initialize() {
    var list = new ListBox();
    list.Items.Add("Here");
    list.Items.Add("Are");
    list.Items.Add("Some");
    list.Items.Add("Items");

    Control.FromHandle(Window.Handle).Controls.Add(list);
}

I hope this method solves a lot of the issues people seem to be having with using these Controls together with XNA.

Well, the multitouch table project I have been working on for a while reached a new milestone when my dad got involved. He has better tools and resources and more electronics experience, so he set up a pretty sweet frame for the table project I am working on.

Once there is some progress in the actual software side of things, I’ll post some videos of some interaction with the table itself. Until then here are the teaser pics

You can see the IR filter that gets replaced here

The lenses from this will help keep the table shorter

Here is a shot my dad sent of the finished tabletop

As a little extra side project (or add-on hardware interface?) to the HMEngine I have decided to put together a table top multitouch piece of hardware. Currently I am working with cheap or free materials and building a prototype at home.

At the moment, I have modified a freebie webcam to work as an IR-only camera using exposed film as my IR pass filter and removing the simple glass IR filter the camera originally had. Also, I am using a $6 piece of glass and a peep hole door viewer from Lowe’s to give the crappy camera a better view angle. The table I am building is circular, and the door viewer causes a large amount of distortion in the images being returned, so I will need to use the HMEngine to do a little preprocessing on the images before sending them on to the touch library TouchLib that will handle the multitouch input detection parts.

Hopefully the project will continue to go as well as it has so far (having only spent about $16 so far) and I will be able to post pictures or maybe even a video soon of the working prototype table. I’ll keep updates coming as they happen.

So a lot has been happening lately. I graduated (at least they haven’t yet told me that I missed some tiny obscure requirements yet.

I have been spending a lot of time lately making sure the new version of XNA coming out in a little while here is fully compatible with the current tutorials and updating the architecture of some of those tutorials a bit as well to reflect some speedup changes that have occurred in my own local copy of the engine’s code.

On top of all of that I have also been working diligently on a good GUI tutorial to try and get some nice menu systems and some in game hud and controls implemented as well. I’ll keep posting updates on that front as it continues.

Lastly, I just hired on as a full time employee at my first real job, which is actually just a continuation of the contract work i have been doing for the last year and a half. The company is a tech startup that offers online management software at a very low price point for foundations and scholarship organizations. We are doing fairly well so far, and hopefully that continues.

That’s all for now. More updates to come as I get more work done on the tutorials. Maybe even some screen shots

Well, I went back through an old archive and a backup of the website from a while ago and got back as much of the original content as I could from those and got it all back on here where it belongs.

I’ll have to be a little more frequent with my backups from now on I guess