I have gone through all of the tutorials with ReSharper on my side helping to optimize things and update all of the code to C# 3.0
There have also been a few minor architectural changes making the different managers (shaders, objects, input etc.) into GameComponents and DrawableGameComponents - which I have been thinking about doing for a while - that drastically simplified the Game class itself.
Take a look at the new setup and let me know what you all think in the forums.
The projects in svn will now require Visual Studio 2008 to be run, and some parts of the code use features available only in C# 3.0, but any of these that your compiler doesn’t support should be fairly easy to write in a C# 2.0 manner.
I’ll let the video do most of the talking, but the progress on the soft body work from the last two posts is coming along nicely. Correct pressure, momentum, and spring handling throughout the body is now fully working, and I can begin moving on to collision detection and other physics aspects outside the body itself now.
Here is a video of the current state of things. I start the demo out with half of the sphere scaled outwards from the center just to give the body something to fix when I start the update cycle. You can easily see the accuracy in the waves moving through the body and how far it has come in only a couple of days of work.
Here’s a first cut of a video of the soft body in action. This one I just offset a vertex near the top of the object a bit to show waves moving through the body after it is released.
So lately alongside the UI tutorial that I have been slowly churning out and making some hard decisions on I have also been throwing together a nice little tech demo using some soft body dynamics that I want to eventually use in a fast action fun XNA game possibly for later release on Xbox Live Arcade.
Assuming things on the Creator’s Club website go as expected, I would like to release the game (which isn’t even fully in the design stage yet) to the site and see what people think of it and hopefully push it all the way through the process out for public download from XBLA.
I’ll get some videos of the soft body stuff up as soon as I am happy with how all the physics behaviors are working out (hopefully soon).
All of the updates for the tutorials to the 3.0 version of the XNA Framework have been completed. I will be uploading and moving the projects in the svn to their appropriate locations and updating the PDF’s as well for the tutorial posts here on the blog.
The process of the conversion from XNA 2.0 to XNA 3.0 has offically begun. I have the CTP of XNA Game Studio 3.0 installed on my copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional and have started going through the tutorials and converting them over to the new version.
Much of the conversion process the last few version upgrades has been pretty simple, with just a few call changes here and there to some of the XNA interfaces, but this time around, I will also be changing quite a bit of the actual engine code as well to better accomodate changes that I have come to make in my private version of the engine.
Some of the suggestions from the forums have been taken into account in the new version of the tutorials as well, so expect to see a lot of improvements (even if they are small ones) in many places in the code. Since XNA 3.0 isn’t officially out yet, I won’t be updating the PDF files on the site here until the full public release, but I will be checking all of the updated tutorials into the svn in the branches/XNA 3.0 folder. They will be moved into the regular tutorial tags spots upon the public release of the new version of XNA.
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
Just thought I would make sure to let everyone know that Microsoft is throwing an official competition for XNA Framework developers. Prizes seem to include a spot on Xbox Live Arcade, although nothing has been officially said in that matter yet. Everyone get cracking on a game.
