That’s right. 2 player splitscreen multiplayer is here!

Go download it.

Michael Klucher posted the news on the XNA Team Blog.

There is a new XNA community website online now.  Check out Creators Club Online. 

Please note, you don’t seem to need to own an XBOX 360 or have a Creators Club subscription. It’s free!

There you’ll find:

• tutorials
• samples
• a new starter kit.
• new forums.

Oh for more time!

Greetings earthlings. 

I’ve just this minute uploaded a new build of “Air Legends”. It’s late, so I won’t blab on about it right now.

Cutting right to the chase, here’s what’s new…

• Added original music. Created by a great buddy of mine, Martin “NadNailerâ€? Kay.
• Collision detection is now optimized for better performance. As promised in my previous post.
• The Screenshot feature is now fixed. Use the PrintScrn key & Controller “Yâ€? button to save a screenshot (in both Jpg & Bmp formats). The files get put in a “ScreenShots” subdirectory of where you installed the game.
• And last but not least, this is the first release using my new Installer. I built it using Microsoft’s Windows Installer XML (aka. “WiX”). See what the wikipedia has to say about it.

Go grab this new release from the Latest Builds page here.

Your feedback is always welcome – via the usual channels.
i.e. Leave a ”comment”.

ENJOY

I have just updated the source Code with some optimizations. (they’ll be incorporated in my next game release soon too)

I haven’t updated the tutorials to reflect these enhancements yet, but the general concept is still the same.

The main changes are these:

• When constructing a BoundingPart you now additionally pass the original ModelMesh’s original BoundingSphere. This is used as a general proximity test, so the rest of the BoundingSphere’s don’t need to be transformed and tested on every frame.
• This behavior is optional. When calling Transform() there is a bool “optimizeâ€? parameter. Pass false and the behavior is as it was before.
• Re factored a little. The List stuff is now encapsulated into a class.
• When you run the sample, you will notice the BoundingSpheres often don’t move with the model. This is deliberate, and demonstrates the optimizations working. It means they didn’t need to get transformed on each frame because nothing (i.e. the 3D Mouse Cursor) is in the general proximity of their BoundingPart.
• the XBOX 360 controller now rumbles when the 3D Mouse cursor collides.

The old “tutorial” code is still available in the usual place, but you can get the new optimized version here also. (just scroll down the page further to find the updated version)

The only way to know for sure is to try it, so sorry for the spam.

Here goes… Read the rest of this entry »

Ultrahead has blogged a wee post seeding some discussion on acceptable texture sizes. Already some good info there in the comments, so definitely one to watch.

“Air Legends” progress…

Lately I’ve been looking at making a proper Installer for “Air Legends”. C# express does not seem to have Installer projects, and I am not a fan of Visual Studio 2005’s installer projects. So I’m currently looking at using Microsoft’s Windows Installer XML (aka. “WiX”).

Shawn Hargreaves helped me solve the problem with my “not ready for public consumption” screenshot feature in “Air Legends”. As it turns out, it actually renders fine on some hardware, but not others. The solution at the moment is not to save in an image format that supports transparency. BMP format works fine. It’ll be fixed in the next release…sometime…when it feels right.

Screenshot code snippet…

Meanwhile here is my screenshot saving code… Read the rest of this entry »

G’day folks. 

A couple of people reported that the last release of “Air Legends” was crashing for them.  I’ve just uploaded a new build containing some small tweaks, and one fix that may help.  If it doesn’t fix the problems outright,  this release may at least assist in diagnosing the mystery problem(s).

Here’s what’s new…

• I discovered and fixed a compiler warning (doh!!!) that was suggesting two of my textures might not work on some video cards.
• I added the ability to change from Fullscreen to Windowed mode.  At this stage it is not an in-game setting.  Just edit the settings.xml file (in Notepad is fine) and change the <FullScreen> element to false. Then try running the game again.

e.g.

<FullScreen>false</FullScreen>

As always, you can get this new release from the Latest Builds page here.

Contrary to what my wife seems to believe, I can’t actually read minds.  So please do let me know if this build crashes for you.

Update:

Just so you know…  You may have discovered my screenshot functionality (PrintScrn key or controller “Y” button). It is not really ready for public consumption, but I forgot to comment it out.  You’ll find the results do not match what you see things on screen.  All the alpha blended stuff comes out funny.  I’m working on this one. 

Greeting earthlings.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while actually.  Ultrahead’s provided me personally a lot of feedback, help & ideas for my own XNA adventures.

Check out his “Do as I say, not as I do …” blog.

He frequently blogs answers to things I haven’t even got round to searching for.  But there’s more to it than just XNA stuff.  Animation, movies, shameless pimpage of Sharky’s blog! 

This one particularly caught my eye…

“TIP: Deploying games to the 360 without sharing source code”

Once again he’s saved me the trouble of actually reading the forums!  Now all I need is a 360!!!

Thanks Ultrahead.

Well it ended up being 3 parts instead of 2. (techinical difficulties with Windows Live Writer, and me ranting on too much)

Anyway, blog form is not ideal for tutorials, so eventually I might make pages out of them.

In the meantime I’ve collated links to the 3 parts & the sample code here.

Enjoy!

After some technical difficulties with Windows Live Writer, I think I’m back in action.

So continuing from where I left off in Part 2 (part 1 is here)…

What about this BoundingPart class then?

As mentioned earlier it wraps a Collection of BoundingSphere’s. Well actually it contains two Collections of BoundingSpheres.

1. One collection is the sphere’s populated as we saw above. These sphere’s coordinates are in Object Space and are populated when the Model is first loaded.
2. The second collection is for holding Transformed versions of these spheres. Their coordinates will be transformed into World Space, and the Radius scaled on each frame of our game. Think of these as being the Spheres as they are positioned and scaled in our game’s world. This is necessary so we can test for Collisions! Object Space simply wouldn’t cut the mustard, since it would be equivalent to having all our models stacked on top of each other at the same (0, 0, 0) position. They’d always be colliding like some kind of roman orgy. World Space puts them in their rightful place with their hands in their pockets.

Read the rest of this entry »