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June 2009 - Posts

Thursday, June 25, 2009 6:17 PM

Generic network prediction

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Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 11 Comments
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:42 AM

Ashu's new blog: sound effects and video encoding

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...
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 0 Comments
Monday, June 22, 2009 8:03 AM

Game State Management and menu sounds

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Friday, June 19, 2009 10:46 AM

Game State Management and glitch free loading

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 1 Comments
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:31 AM

Game State Management and DrawableGameComponent

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.
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 9 Comments
Monday, June 15, 2009 7:52 AM

Content Pipeline types (updated)

My colleague Ito pointed out that my diagram showing the flow of types through the Content Pipeline was a little out of date, and was kind enough to update it to include the more recent audio and video types:
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 4 Comments
Monday, June 15, 2009 7:44 AM

AppWeek: level editing

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 0 Comments
Saturday, June 13, 2009 8:32 AM

More AppWeek

My colleague Brandon writes about his Avatar Boxing AppWeek game , which was oh so much more funnier than mine...
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 2 Comments
Friday, June 12, 2009 1:05 PM

AppWeek

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Friday, June 12, 2009 1:03 PM

SoundEffect changes in XNA Game Studio 3.1

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 6:32 PM

Pumping the Guide

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" , "Cancel"
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 10 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 11:00 AM

MotoGP: LOD selection

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Thursday, June 04, 2009 1:42 PM

MotoGP: mind the gap

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 4 Comments
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 12:38 PM

MotoGP: curved surfaces

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 1 Comments
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 5:11 PM

MotoGP: The Price Is Right

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
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 4 Comments
 
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