I’m planning to start a new project. It will probably be in 2D and I’m thinking of a small platforms or a RPG. For it, I will be using the Microsoft’s XNA Platform, so I can practice a little bit more using it.

That’s why I started reading a new book: Learning XNA 3.0, written by Aaron Reed who, according to O’Reilly’s webpage, is the Vice President of Employer Relations at Neumont University, a software engineering university located near Salt Lake City, Utah. Holds a BS in Computer Science and an MBA and is Microsoft MCAD certified. He has also taught several courses at Neumont, including some about XNA.

So far, I like the book. It covers the basics to use this platform. The book is split in two major parts, one related to 2D and another one for 3D. Once I finish with the 2D part I will start programming this new small game I’m thinking of.

I remember a conversation I had in about sixth grade, when CD-ROM was relatively new technology.  My friend Andrew was trying to convince me that “CD-ROM Graphics” was, well, something that only a CD could bring you.  Games like The Journeyman Project and 7th Guest definitely did things that you couldn’t do on 3.5″ floppies, but a graphic is a graphic, whether it’s stored on a CD, hard drive, laserdisc, etc.  Anyway, the dialogue would go something like:

“The background in Diamonds looks good, but it’s not CD-ROM graphics.”

“You know a 1 MB image will look just as good if it’s on a CD as it will if it’s on the hard drive?”

“Well, it’s still not CD-ROM graphics.”

When the term “Flash Games” gets thrown around to describe anything on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel (and, ugh, yes, The Dishwasher, which, for the last effing time, is an Arcade title, thankyouverymuch), I am reminded of Andrew and CD-ROM graphics.  It’s basically the guy who has seen one thing, seen another thing, and, with scant knowledge of, well, anything else, has decided that they are the same.  Adventure game on a CD?  That’s CD-ROM graphics.  2D small scope game?  That’s a Flash Game.

The more logical aspect of the argument is that Flash games are free, so why pay for Xbox Indie Games of [apparently] equal or lesser value?

Well (obvious setup here), they’re not of equal or lesser value.  Content aside (and sure, there’s some questionable quality on XBLIG), let’s talk specs:

• I don’t like playing games on a keyboard, unless it’s a mouse+keyboard shooter.  XBLIG means you’re using an Xbox360 controller; Flash means you’re using a keyboard and/or mouse.
• XBLIG is multiplayer-friendly.  Most games that can support 4-player couch coop (like Z0MB1ES!) do; some support multiplayer on Xbox Live (like ZP2K9!).  I can’t speak for all of Flash, but couch coop is out (no-brianer) and when there is a multiplayer effort, it seems like it’s part of a larger business effort, which means we’re going to be paying that value in one way or another (advertising, sneaky advertising, and maliciously sneaky advertising)
• XBLIG games get to use Xbox360 hardware.  Z0MB1ES in Flash?  Not possible!  Not all things that take place on a 2D plane are created equal; to port Z0MB1ES to Flash I’d have to cut a bunch of stuff and the game would still run poorly on lower end systems (and, let’s face it, do the God Box builders really make their systems to play Flash games?)
• XBLIG games don’t play in a little box in the middle of a browser surrounded by banner ads.

(And where’s the outrage at having to spend $3 on a Flash-to-iPhone port that crashes all the time?)

Of course, I don’t hate Flash.  I made my site with it.  Heck, I was once technically a professional Flash developer.  I just prefer XBLIG to Flash as a games platform.  XBLIG is a platform that can offer gamers much, much more.

Also, I keep forgetting the definite possibility that all of the “Indie Games = Flash” sentiments are from PS3/PC fanboys and/or disgruntled XBLIG developer hopefuls who gave up because it was “too stupid.”  In which case I shouldn’t care.  Because there are insecurity issues at hand which I am not adequately trained to help with.

And please, someone, slap me a few times the next time I start to read Internet comments.

This is a short tutorial which I’m also posting on the zAnimation codeplex wiki. The next one should be about building a new project with zAnimation. This was going to be a video tutorial, but my english speaking abilities sock. As well as my english writing abilities. Also I suck at modeling/animating, so this shouldn’t be taken as a modeling tutorial. It’s a tutorial on how to export stuff.  So let’s get started.

 
1. First a bit of back info. What’s our goal? To make some connected vertices that can be controlled by a number of joints. Each vertex has a List of values indicating how much a certain bone is affecting it. This is done by a technique called smooth skin binding. First make some geometry. It doesn’t matter if the geometry is a single big mesh or a number of smaller meshes. In the end they’re all vertices. I’ll be working with a very simple object and a very simple animation – a door which can open and close. Next is the joint placing. Next is skin binding. This connects the geometry to the joints, and is the backbone of this whole process. After that is weight painting – assigning values to vertices depending on how much do you want a bone to influence that single vertex. Next is animating or keyframing. Essentially remembering the posing of  bones at various times in our timeline. This is directly linked to the animations refresh rate. zAnimation requires special timeline format, but we’ll get to that. And the last step will be exporting, making sure that our data reaches XNA. Have fun!

 

2. I’ll show you how to properly animate a model for export to XNA via zAnimation. Load up your model in Maya. I’m using Maya 2010, but an older version should work. I’m using a model with only 2 joints but models with more joints will work correctly as well.
    
   

 

3. In case you have a skin already attached and weights painted, skip this step. Select your root joint and your geometry and go to Skin > Bind Skin > Smooth Bind (with options). Also make sure you’re in the animation mode. Setup your skin here including max influences, bind method and other options. When you’re done select your geometry and go to Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool (with options). Paint your bone weights here. Don’t miss a bone, because if a bone doesn’t have skin weights attached to at least a single vertice it will be ignored during the import into XNA, and all its children will be lost and you’ll get an error probably. So these are my weights.
    
   

 

4. Try moving a joint now, see if your geometry is moving as expected. If that’s alright we can begin keyframing. Select all your joints by clicking on the root joint, right clicking and selecting “Select Hierarchy”. We have to key each joint on the first and the second frame in their original positions. This is called a bind pose, a reference to all future joint transformations. Place the timeline marker to the first frame, go to your “Channel Box” (shown in the image), select all the translation, rotation and scale values, right click and select “Key selected”. To this again but with the timeline marker on the second frame, and again at the fourth frame. In the third frame move all your joints a bit and keyframe them. You can skip this last step if you have a bigger animation moving ALL your joints. If a joint isn’t moved in the animation it will be ignored by the XNA FBX importer, and will probably generate an error. After this you can continue with your animation clips as desired (from frame 5 onward). I’ll make a simple open and close animations. Be aware that the default refresh rate is 60 frames per second and zAnimation will import animation at that frame rate, so time your animations properly.
    
   

 

5. Bake your animation. Select all your joints by clicking the root joint and selecting “Select Hierarchy”, go to Edit > Keys > Bake Simulation (with options). Keep the default settings except start/end time and select “Driven channels” and remove “Keep unbaked keys”. Be sure to bake the entire animation timeline. This step is required because zAnimation doesn’t interpolate the joint transformations between the keyframes. Yet. Press Bake. After this is done, position your timeline marker at frame 1 and select you geometry. From there select Skin > Go to Bind Pose, and you’re ready for export.

 

6. Export your geometry and joints by selecting all of them (the entire joint hierarchy) and selecting File > Export Selection. After picking the file name and path you’ll be greeted by the FBX export dialog. Be sure you have the newest Maya FBX exporter (I have FBX201000). The important things for zAnimation are “Animation”, “Deformed models” and “Skins”. You should select them all. Click Export, and you’re done!

 
This has been a fast rundown of how to export a model from Maya to XNA using zAnimation. In the next post I’ll be explaining how to create a new XNA game with zAnimation and playing an animation. Regarding IK handles, they don’t get exported so be sure to bake the animation to your joints. You don’t have to delete them they won’t interfere. Please post feedback if you encountered problems or if you just have something to say!

I’ve been integrating a lot of artwork recently and polishing up the apperance of many of the non-combat screens.  On this blog up to this point, I’ve only shown the main combat screens and how it has been progresssing.  In this post, you can see a few of the other “secondary” screens.

This screenshot shows the title.  This is the very first thing you see after the XNA splash:

This next screenshot shows the map screen.  You use this screen to view where you currently are and where you can travel to.  It also shows a quick glance at your stats:

This third screenshot shows the equipment management screen.  This is where you view and equip gear from each of the three equipment slots:

This last shot is from the story screen.  Each part of a quest story is presented on this screen before and after various quests:

I had my FYP meeting last friday week as usually do. Being less than motivated and needing to change gear I asked Chris, my lecturer how does one keep motivated in a big individual programming project? After first suggesting substance abuse (as a joke) he then told me, don’t let the little things get put to the side and build up in a pile. First bit of good advice seeing as I had quite a pile of little things that I couldn’t stand looking at. Second bit of good advice he gave me was if you’re getting bogged down with one section, then take a break and go onto a differant section for a while. So that’s what I did. I abandoned buildings creating units and looked into how I am going to script the game. It will be months before I get onto implementing this in-game but I fealt like a change of pace and this was something new. So after a little googling I found this. I tried out the test program myself and I thought it was very encouraging. But. One small issue I have to put out there:

If using lua watch out when using notepad or wordpad to create lua script files.

Notepad inserts hidden characters that cause lua interpreter errors. I just happen to catch this on about the third last comment in this thread. My dirty solution was to write a quick csharp app that wrote what I typed into the command line into a lua script file and that solved the problem.

After I made that bit of success on my break from code going straight into the fyp I decided, right I’m getting rid of that list of small things. They were annoying me and just seeing the list written out in my notebook was so offputting. I won’t bore anyone with the details but I hit the list and finished:

• bullet memory management.
• construction site memory management.
• construction site collision handling.
• grid computing code.
• correct level initalisation.
• campaign organisation.
• race builder code.

And yes finally:

• control system on click context.
• context sensitive gui transition.
• building, unit and builder menus.

Though not completely perfect yet it’s funny just how much work I got done just picking off little things.

And now onto the important details. I’m between a third and a half way through spellforce OotD and getting a little tired of rpgs, about half way through halo 2 (for about my third time).

Today I have two XNA samples fresh out of the oven: a Motion Blur Sample, and Depth Of Field Sample.  I figure all of the kids these days wanna add fancy post-processing tricks to their games, right?  The motion blur sample shows you how to do camera motion blur using a depth buffer, or full object motion blur using a velocity buffer. The depth of field sample shows you how to do a standard blur-based DOF, a slightly-smarter blur-based DOF that doesn’t blur across edges, and the somewhat more physically accurate disc blur approach.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Commercial

Blade3D
Blade3D specializes in producing high-quality game content and reducing the cost of art production for leading game companies such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, and Eidos

Visual3D.net
Visual3D’s All-in-One Game Development Toolset enables rapid development of 3D interactive simulations, virtual worlds, and next generation games using C#, .NET and XNA

TorqueX
Looking to put your game on a console? Whether your console of choice is the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, or even the iPhone, TorquePowered.com has the engine for you.

SunBurn
Combining the latest lighting and rendering technology with a flexible and easy to use framework, SunBurn performs the heavy-lifting, letting you focus on your games.

Free/Open Source

Flat Red Ball
The FlatRedBall name is most commonly associated with the FlatRedBall Engine; however, FlatRedBall does not only create and distribute a game engine, but also a collection of original video games. Although there are two sides to FlatRedBall, each is closely related to the other

Qx
Ox is a mature 3D XNA game engine ready for use in your free or commercial project. It features a 3D scene system with a visual scene editor, a 2D gui system (also with its own editor), JigLibX physics, fully-integrated XNAnimation animation system, and C# game scripting system.

Quickstart 3D Game Engine
The QuickStart Engine is an engine designed to allow a programmer to get a 3D game started in XNA Game Studio as quick as possible. The QuickStart Engine is designed to make it easier to get a 3D XNA project off the ground, by taking care of the framework for you, like physics, animation, rendering, etc. Some of this is still lacking, but the point in having a community project is that anyone can pick it up and add to the engine, or optimize what is already there.

X-Engine
The X-Engine is a game engine built around Microsoft’s XNA project. It is designed to make implementation of many common tasks easy, as well as expand upon this with some more advanced features

BetaCell
BetaCell is a toolkit designed to aid computer graphics programmers to achieve their objectives by embracing DRY (don’t repeat yourself) code and offering an object oriented perspective with design patterns.

Thrust
Thrust is the framework for writing XNA games across the Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune platforms

Particle Engine

Mercury
Mercury Particle Engine is a multi-platform API which allows developers to add rich visual effects to their games. Implemented in C# and targeting the Microsoft XNA Framework, it is fully compatible with Windows and Xbox 360.

Physics Engine

Farseer
The Farseer Physics Engine is an easy to use 2D physics engine designed for Microsoft’s XNA and Silverlight platforms. The Farseer Physics Engine focuses on simplicity, useful features, and enabling the creation of fun, dynamic games.

JigLibX
JigLibX is a specially for XNA designed C# port of the Physic Engine “JigLib”

BulletX
BulletX is the first fully managed 3D physics engine, it supports Windows and XBox360 platforms

Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio allows independent developers to create their own games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune devices – in fact this is what Microsoft say about it: -

“The first step on the road to being a world-famous creator is creating your own game. Fortunately, it’s never been easier to get started, using XNA Game Studio. Available for free, and integrated with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual C# 2008 Express, XNA Game Studio is your ticket to creating great games on Xbox 360, Windows, and Zune.”

So a completely free way to get involved in video game development with plenty of tutorials and resources available, but is it really that easy to to use and produce a game if you have no experience at all?

I’ve been wanting to creating my own video games for years and whilst I have a fairly good knowledge of computers, I have absolutely no knowledge of creating video games. So I’m going to start from scratch using only the free tools provided by Microsoft and resources found on the XNA Creators Club website.

Depending on how this all goes then I may start to use trusty old Google to find some external resources to help me learn.

Well here I go, you can follow my progress as I’ll post updates on my blog and hopefully you will all be able to see what I produce in a few weeks.

If you have an interest developing video games and want to have a go with XNA Game Studio you can find all you need to know at the following link: -

XNA Creators Club Website

Author: José M. Franco Pérez

Date: September 17^th 2009

Language: C# on XNA Framework

Subject: Static 2D shooting game

Description: This project was created in three days for a practical test of a company’s selection process. Alien attack is a simple 2D game where the ‘Hero’ must defend a company called “Jeans Game Studio” against the attacks of a bunch of strange guys called the ‘EconomAliens’. The game provides a basic 2D background where the player can move Up and Down and shoot a gun. The aliens have been created to appear in a random height at a random velocity to increase the game’s entertainment.

Source Code: Download here!

Code Snippet:

//Update method. Moves the bullet and checks the collision with other objects.
//'objs' is an array containing the objects to check the collision with.
//Rectangular collision is used: Creates a rectangle around the bullet and check
// if it touches a rectangle created around the objects in 'objs'.
//Returns true if there was a collision. The bullet destroyed an enemy.
public bool update(Rectangle vpRect, GObject[] objs)
{
    if (isAlive())
    {
        position += velocity;
        //Kill the bullet if it went out of the screen
        if (!vpRect.Contains(new Point((int)position.X, (int)position.Y)))
        {
            alive = false;
        }

        /* Checking collision */
        Rectangle bulletRect = new Rectangle(
        (int)position.X,  (int)position.Y,
        sprite.Width, sprite.Height);
        foreach (GObject obj in objs)
        {
            Rectangle objRect = new Rectangle(
            (int)obj.getPositionX(),  (int)obj.getPositionY(),
            (int)obj.getWidth(),  (int)obj.getHeight());

            //If the rectangles touch each other, we kill both of them.
            if (bulletRect.Intersects(objRect))
            {
                kill();
                obj.kill();
                return true;
            }
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Screenshots:

Presentation Screen. Short description of its thrilling story

Playing. The EconomAliens won't stop coming!

I have uploaded a new video, in three parts, explaining how to use the HLSL effects supplied with the Softimage XNA add-on. This video covers the setup of the game assets, the Standard Annotations and Semantics bindings with the XSISASContainer class and some HLSL code editing for adding a self-shadowing term to the illumination model.

Read the related thread on XNA Community Forums

If all you want to do is a 50% alpha, you can create that via a Vector4 in the color. The alpha float will be between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%) and you’d just use this color in your spritebatch while drawing the particle.

float alpha = .50f;
Color color = new Color(
    255,
    255,
    255,
    255 * (byte)alpha);

To rendering with transparent effect, example,  vertex with transparent alpha value or a .png image with transparent area, just add code below before effect.Begin() called

effect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable = true;
effect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.SourceBlend = Blend.SourceAlpha;
effect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.DestinationBlend = Blend.InverseSourceAlpha;

In my example code, i will render some line, a transparent line. Befor rendering, i save some properties value of GraphicsDevice object, so i can restore it’s state after rendering

public void Draw(Matrix viewMatrix, Matrix projectionMatrix)
{
    bool alphaBlendEnable = basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable;
    Blend sourceAlpha = basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.SourceBlend;
    Blend inverseSourceAlpha = basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.DestinationBlend;

    basicEffect.World = Matrix.Identity;
    basicEffect.View = viewMatrix;
    basicEffect.Projection = projectionMatrix;
    basicEffect.VertexColorEnabled = true;

    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable = true;
    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.SourceBlend = Blend.SourceAlpha;
    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.DestinationBlend = Blend.InverseSourceAlpha;

    basicEffect.Begin();

    foreach (EffectPass pass in basicEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes)
    {
        pass.Begin();

        device.VertexDeclaration = vertDeclaration;
        device.DrawUserPrimitives<VertexPositionColor>(PrimitiveType.LineList, vertices, 0, vertices.Length / 2);

        pass.End();
    }
    basicEffect.End();

    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.AlphaBlendEnable = alphaBlendEnable;
    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.SourceBlend = sourceAlpha;
    basicEffect.GraphicsDevice.RenderState.DestinationBlend = inverseSourceAlpha;
}

Project Dooley is underway as of today. C# + XNA is the language + framework that I’ve chosen. The primary focus is going to be to get a version running on Windows but a port to XBox 360 is possible and perhaps even likely. And if I feel like the gameplay experience is fun enough, I may even join the XNA Creator’s Club to release it through the XBox Live Indie Games branding. But that is a decision I’ll leave for later.

I’ve been studying up on agile development a little bit while I’ve been handling the designing of Project Dooley. So, I’m gonna give that a try and see if it is as useful a paradigm as it seems to be from the things I’ve read about it.

What’s a game or an interactive presentation without a way to move around? So in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make a rotated camera. This is a simple class to make a camera that can rotating about a fixed point rather than origin point (0, 0, 0)

Keyboard Control :

KEY UP – for rotating up

KEY DOWN – for rotating down

KEY RIGHT – for rotating right

KEY LEFT – for rotating left

Note : for using this code in your application, do not forget to change camera position, camera target and camera up vector (as you needed)

public class RotatedCamera
{

    Matrix viewMatrix;
    Matrix projectionMatrix;

    Vector3 camPosition;
    Vector3 camTarget;
    Vector3 camUpVector;

    float viewAngle;
    float aspectRatio;
    float nearPlane;
    float farPlane;

    private float yAngle = 0f;
    private float xAngle = 0f;

    #region Properties

    public Vector3 CamPosition
    {
        get { return camPosition; }
        set { camPosition = value; }
    }

    public Vector3 CamTarget
    {
        get { return camTarget; }
        set { camTarget = value; }
    }

    public Vector3 CamUpVector
    {
        get { return camUpVector; }
        set { camUpVector = value; }
    }

    public Matrix ViewMatrix
    {
        get { return viewMatrix; }
    }

    public Matrix ProjectionMatrix
    {
        get { return projectionMatrix; }
    }

    #endregion

    public RotatedCamera()
    {
    }

    public void Update(GameTime gameTime, KeyboardState keyboardState)
    {
        bool isChanged = false;

        if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right))
        {
            yAngle -= 0.010f;
            isChanged = true;
        }
        else if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left))
        {
            yAngle += 0.010f;
            isChanged = true;
        }

        if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up))
        {
            xAngle -= 0.010f;
            isChanged = true;
        }
        else if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down))
        {
            xAngle += 0.010f;
            isChanged = true;
        }

        if (xAngle > 0.2f)
            xAngle = 0.2f;
        else if (xAngle < -0.2f)
            xAngle = -0.2f;

        if (isChanged)
            UpdateViewMatrix();
    }

    private void UpdateViewMatrix()
    {
        Matrix rotationMatrix =
            Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-camTarget.X, -camTarget.Y, -camTarget.Z)) *
            Matrix.CreateRotationX(3 * xAngle) *
            Matrix.CreateRotationY(3 * yAngle) *
            Matrix.CreateTranslation(camTarget);
        Vector3 transformedVector = Vector3.Transform(camPosition, rotationMatrix);

        viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(transformedVector, camTarget, camUpVector);
    }

    public void SetUpCamera(GraphicsDevice device)
    {
        camPosition = new Vector3(350, -700, -500);  // default
        camTarget = new Vector3(350, 0, 300);        // default
        camUpVector = new Vector3(0, -1, 0);         // default

        viewMatrix = Matrix.CreateLookAt(camPosition, camTarget, camUpVector);

        viewAngle = MathHelper.PiOver4;
        aspectRatio = device.Viewport.AspectRatio;
        nearPlane = 5.0f;
        farPlane = 10000.0f;
        projectionMatrix = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(viewAngle, aspectRatio, nearPlane, farPlane);
    }

}

Game Title : INVADERZ

Genre : Shoot ‘em up

Type : Game 3D

Framework : XNA Game Studio 3.1

Tool :

-    Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP 1
-    SpriteFont 1.2

DOWNLOAD HERE

Today I launched the blog for Dangermoose Studios. I created Dangermoose Studios as a  cover name for my work creating “indie” games built using the XNA framework and Torque X and may develop it into a business in future.

I will use this blog to highlight current projects, discuss development of these projects, as well as focusing on the use of Torque X and XNA as a development platform.

In the future I hope the site will develop into something more than a blog and a dream

More to come soon!

Como ya os comentaba hace unos días Jesús Bosch ha seguido toqueteando un poco más su ejemplo sobre detección de movimientos y esta vez lo aplica directamente sobre una aplicación para que veamos uno de sus posibles usos. La verdad que queda muy bien y quién sabe lo que anda tramando tras esto . El resultado podéis verlo en el video, a través de la detección de cambio de color en la imagen mueve hacia los lados al modelo de la nave, seguro que a vosotros se os ocurren muchas ideas de posibles aplicaciones de este ejemplo en otro tipo de juegos. Si queréis probar este nuevo ejemplo esta es la web de descarga: http://xnacommunity.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Detecci%u00f3n%20movimientos%20II

Hola a todos, ya está disponible para descargar le video y todos los recursos usados en el último webcast que anunciamos, su autor fue Rodrigo Díaz Tajada y él nos contaba los primeros pasos para la creación de juegos en XNA.

La charla trató sobre los siguientes puntos:

• Uso de las matrices de vista y proyección.
• Carga de modelos 3D.
• Pasos para exportar un modelo de 3DS Max a XNA.
• Diferencias entre los formatos FBX y X.
• Aplicación de efectos (shaders) personalizados.

Para acceder a la web de descarga de los archivos y del video haced click en el siguiente enlace:

http://xnacommunity.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=WebcastXNA3D&referringTitle=Home