Coding4Fun : XNA

Coding4Fun at PDC 2009 – Video Montage

Coding4Fun — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:25:00 GMT

We’ll be posting one project each month but here is the Coding4Fun booth at PDC 2009! You can even view the Iron Bartender challenge at GeekFest as well!

Overall Recap of each project

Iron Bartender!

Is this frame straight?

Coding4Fun — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:27:39 GMT

Joel Ivory Johnson created a rather functional program for his Zune HD. Joel created a bubble level based on the accelerometer in the Zune HD to get the tilt of the device. From that data and everyone’s favorite theorem, he created a bubble level!

Joel also explains the math needed for doing this such as calculating the direction and the magnitude.

Vector3 accelReading = accelState.Acceleration;

tiltDirection = (float)Math.Atan2(accelReading.Y, accelReading.X);
tiltMagnitude = (float)Math.Sqrt(accelReading.X * accelReading.X + 
                 accelReading.Y * accelReading.Y );

Coding4Fun at PDC!

Coding4Fun — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:09:56 GMT

Coding4Fun is in attendance at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference! We are demoing 5 projects that will have full how-to’s and will be open-sourced as well. Drinktendr, Mind Blaster, Laser Graffiti, Augmented Reality, and Wi-Fi Warthogs are powered by .Net, XNA, WPF, Ling2Sql, WiiMote, MSMQ, Power Wheels, a Mind Set and a giant freaking laser!

Drinktendr

Ever get tired of pouring your own drink? Have someone get upset at you since it was too strong or too weak? Well, why not have a machine pour you the perfect beverage every time! Drinktendr uses Linq2Sql and SQL Server to know what drinks it can make with what is on hand. Combine this with WPF; the end user is given a top end experience.

Mind Blaster

With aliens threatening to invade Earth, it’s your job to travel into outer space and destroy the alien threat…with your mind! Wearing a brainwave detecting headset, coupled with head tracking hardware using a wiimote, use only your brain to destroy alien ships before they destroy you and the rest of humanity.

Laser Graffiti

Putting graffiti on something is not a very nice thing to do but what if with a flick of a switch, it was gone. With a projector, an off the shelf webcam and a laser pointer, you can do just that. Aim the laser at the building and start drawing. Turn off the laser and it all goes away! Using WPF and XNA, we can apply a variety of effects including fire, paint, and various particles. This project was influenced by the Graffiti Research Lab.

Augmented Reality

We’ll be showing off two AR games. ARroller and AR Domino Knockdown. ARroller is a single-player “marble game” experienced through a 3DOF-tracked video–see-through head-worn display. The player holds a tracked board on which a virtual marble must be manipulated through a maze of obstacles by tilting and moving the board. AR Domino Knockdown is a two-player first-person-shooter. Players hold 6DOF-tracked UMPCs through which they fire virtual balls at a configuration of virtual dominos on a shared table.

Wi-Fi Warthogs

Go big or go home. After seeing Halo, we decided we had to make some remote control wart hogs to play laser tag with. Using Xbox controllers, a wireless network, and Power Wheel cars, we’ve made a game of laser tag like no other.

XNA Role Playing Game (RPG) Starter Kit

Coding4Fun — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:31:00 GMT

Charlie Calvert has created great post covering the XNA Role Playing Game Starter Kit from the XNA team.

Charlie talks about the tile engine and the quest engine. The tile engine supports several layers to create a complex final level. The first layer allows you to define a basic landscape or the interior of a building. A second layer allows you to decorate it with trees, chairs, or other objects. A third layer contains your sprites, and a fourth layer defines the boundaries inside which the sprites can move.

The downloads for the RGP Starter Kit are broken out into versions for XNA Game Studio 2.0 and 3.0. There is also a distinction between code that targets Windows and code for the XBox:

Here are some additional links

Home page and some documentation for the starter kit.
Forum thread for discussing the kit.
Information on the quest engine.
Information the the tile engine.

XNA and textures

Coding4Fun — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:11:34 GMT

Looking for some XNA help? Shawn Hargreaves’s blog has a bunch of answers questions like anisotropic filtering, mipmapping, and texture filtering.

If you’re not sure what mipmapping is, it is precalculating a copy of an image that is smaller than the original. This way you control the rendering rather than having it computed on the fly!

XNA Extensions for Zune HD

Coding4Fun — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:48:25 GMT

Want to see how to do some neat stuff on the Zune HD?

Development Prerequisites (install in this order):

Visual Studio (non-express) or Visual C# 2008 Express (download)
XNA Game Studio 3.1 (download)
XNA Game Studio Zune Extensions (download)

Dan waters is also blogging about creating a full blown game for the ZuneHD called Inertia. In the first article, Dan talks about his level creation / design and how to get the base of the game ready for a Zune HD.

Aliens invading with XNA

Coding4Fun — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:10:00 GMT

Brian Peek, of wiimote fame, gave a talk to the Facebook .NET Programmers Group and had it recorded. The talk is about creating a clone of Space Invaders called Alien Attack in XNA Game Studio 3.0. If you want even greater detail, this is the first chapter in the Coding4Fun book.

Meeting #13 - Coding4Fun: Designing a Video Game using XNA Game Studio 3.0 from Muneeb on Vimeo.

You can find a quick, low-res, streaming version below, or you can download and play the recording at a higher resolution in Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

XNA Game Studio 3.1

Coding4Fun — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:14:38 GMT

XNA Game Studio 3.1 has just been released! Download XNA GS 3.1 and check out the walkthrough for upgrading your old projects to v3.1! For a more in-depth overview of what is new in 3.1, head to http://creators.xna.com/en-us/article/xnags3.1whatsnew.

A quick overview of what is new:

Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
Full screen video playback
Video playback to simple textures in game
Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
Play back multiple video streams at the same time
Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add customer types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.