Archive for January, 2007

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

Howdy folks.

Well, it’s been a long time since I blogged about anything other than my own game development.  Frankly I’m quite overcome with the flood of useful information coming out now that XNA v1.0 (full, not beta) is out in the wild.

In the back of my mind I’ve known for some time I’ll be needing some sort of Terrain rendered in my game (I want to be able to land the planes to refuel/rearm etc…).  A bit of a daunting TODO that one!  So naturally this news caught my eye.

New Terrain Component – Coming Soon! at CodeAnxiety

 

Sounds like yet another blog to keep an eye on.  If only I had more eyes.

 

;)

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 163 user reviews.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

Happy New Year all!  Hope you all got lots of pressies and are having a great 2007 so far.

As promised, here’s a new release to play with. Here’s what’s in it…

  • There a some new and significantly better Sound Effects!  In particular the Engine sounds are way better, and both planes have their own distinct sound.  My favourite is the new sound effects for when you get hit by bullets. 
  • Fixed a problem with engine sounds continuing even after an explosion.
  • Fireball particles should now look better on lower framerate computers, or when the FPS drops out briefly. Should no longer leave gaps.
  • This release also contains a work-around to a known XNA problem when switching to Full-screen.  The framework would use a Monitor refresh rate that is way to  high for some people’s systems.

Big thanks to Ultrahead for alerting me to the full-screen problem and suggesting the good work-around. The game now forces the Refresh rate to something most people’s systems should be able to handle: 75hz.  If even this is too high there is a Settings.Xml setting you can tweak.  If 60hz doesn’t work then probably nothing will.  I chose 75hz since 60hz has evil flickering.  You could go higher if you know what you are doing and what your monitor is capable of, but do so at your own risk. NOTE: the game always tries to use the current Windows Desktop resolution.

Feel free to grab the new release from the Latest Builds page here.

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 270 user reviews.