June, 2009

Government Health Warning: this post contains more C# than English! My AppWeek game used code from the Network Prediction sample to smooth the movement of remotely controlled avatars, tanks, and hoverships. To support three types of entity with varying...

My colleague Ashu has a blog where he talks about SoundEffect changes and how to encode videos for XNA Game Studio 3.1 . He brews a mean IPA, too...

I wanted to add menu sounds to the Game State Management sample code I used in my AppWeek game , to make it play small clicks when changing the menu selection and bigger clicks when moving from one screen to another. Menu selection sounds were easy: add...

I think the core architecture of the Game State Management sample is really solid, but the specific screen implementations included with it are a little more placeholderey. We figured most people would reskin or replace the individual screens, so we concentrated...

I used the Game State Management sample as a basis for my AppWeek game . I also used several samples that are implemented as a DrawableGameComponent ( bloom , lensflare , 3D particles ). Herein lies a dilemma: Components are global to the entire game...

My colleague Ito pointed out that my diagram showing the flow of types through the Content Pipeline was a little out of date, and was kind enough to update it to include the more recent audio and video types:

I created the levels for my AppWeek game using Paint.NET and a variant of the TerrainProcessor from the Heightmap Collision with Normals sample. I wanted hills and valleys in specific places, so I drew a crude approximation in Paint.NET. I started with...

My colleague Brandon writes about his Avatar Boxing AppWeek game , which was oh so much more funnier than mine...

Toward the end of every Game Studio development cycle, we schedule some time to down tools, install the latest daily build, and use it to make a game. This serves as a sanity check ( does our product actually work? ) and also a learning exercise ( what...

One of the few breaking API changes between Game Studio 3.0 and 3.1 concerns the SoundEffect.Play method. There are two different scenarios for playing sound effects: Fire & forget is when you want to trigger a sound, then not have to worry about...

I've never been happy with the design of the XNA Framework Guide methods. I want to write code like this: int ? button = Guide.ShowMessageBox( "Save Game" , "Do you want to save your progress?" , new string [] { "OK"...

So there we were with our bikes and track sectors tessellated at three levels of detail (LOD). How do we choose which LOD to use for each model? Naive version : measure distance from the camera. This works fine if your field of view is constant, but our...

I keep thinking I'm done writing about MotoGP, but then more topics occur to me. And then I think, is this just self indulgent rambling through the meadows of nostalgia? "Here's a tall tale from back when I was a lad, when computers were still programmed...

The bikes and tracks in MotoGP were built using a type of curved surface called a Bezier patch . We originally developed this technology for Playstation 2, and although I never shipped any games using it on that hardware, I still have fond (?) memories...

Most game design documents include a resource budget section, where you are expected to write things like " my AI will use 5% of the CPU and 1.5 megabytes of RAM ". This is bulls**t, and intellectually dishonest. It is simply not possible to...