Thursday, February 11, 2010

New XNA Role Playing Game tutorial!

I have just added the next tutorial in my XNA role playing game tutorial series to my web site! In this tutorial I continued on with the player being able to pick up items off the map. I created a new screen to display the contents of a chest. At the moment there is only gold in the chest but soon there will be the ability to be items as well. You can find the link to the tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my web site.

I hope to have another tutorial in my XNA role playing game series finished in the very near future!

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Was pretty busy today

Welcome back!

I spent most of this evening working on the new tutorial in my XNA role playing game tutorial series. I was able to get all that I wanted to accomplish with code done tonight. I should have the writing finished tomorrow for sure. What I have now is that when the player touches a chest a pop up appears letting the player know that they have found treasure and it lets them know that they have found a random amount of gold. Placing actual items into the chests will be a little harder to accomplish. I will have to add a few classes to the game to handle inventory. I will also have to create the actual items that will go into the game. This is a rather complex process but I will take it one step at a time. In case you are interested, this is a screen shot of what I have working now.



Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

2 new XNA tutorials!

Welcome back!

Well, I added the two new XNA tutorials to my web site on the 9th. I say the 9th because by the time I'm done writing this entry it will probably be the 10th for me. I mentioned on my site, and probably here, that I had two tutorials on creating a screen management system with XNA to add to my screen manager tutorial series. In the first tutorial I added in support for an Xbox 360 controller, in the second tutorial I showed how to create a pop up screen. You can find the links to the tutorials on the XNA Tutorials page of my web site.

I plan to work on the next tutorial in my role playing game tutorial series and have that available soon as well. Good luck with your XNA game programming adventures.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Saturday, February 6, 2010

More about Xin

Welcome back!

I was working a little with Xin and I have found it to be very helpful. Once I finish writing up some documentation for Xin I will be releasing it for anybody who would like to use it. I'm thinking of going with a create commons licence for using Xin. That Xin is free to use for commerical and non-commercial use but a mention in your game or documentation would be required.

I have been under the weather the past few days so I haven't really done much real programming. Everything that I did was Xin was mostly just fixing a few minor errors here and there. I won't be working on Eyes of the Dragon tomorrow, as it is Sunday and I don't like to work on Sunday. I do hope to have the next tutorial available by Tuesday though. That would be the 9th, GMT-5.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Friday, February 5, 2010

Updated my site a little

Welcome back!

I did a little work on my web site, XNA Game Programming Adventures, today. I made archive pages of the blog entries for December last year and January this year. There are links to the archives on the main blog page http://xna.jtmbooks.com/xnagpablog.html. I'm looking into using Google's Adsense to be able able to search my site so people can try and find things that have been archived.

I have also done a little work with X-In 611. That is what I think I'm officially going to name my input handling class library. I know I haven't invented the wheel here but I've been testing X-In 611 with demo games that I've written and I am so impressed with it so far. It wouldn't be useful for a game that does all of its input in the main class but if you are making a complex game that handles input in different classes, like the menu components that I've used in the RPG, it makes life so much easier. I've also started working with being able to control the motors in the Xbox 360 controller to make make the game pad vibrate. I did a simple test in a demo that I made and it is worked pretty good. I will let you know when X-In 611 is going to be released as I'm sure it would be useful to you if you are making an RPG of your own.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Thursday, February 4, 2010

New XNA Role Playing Game tutorial!

Welcome back!

I have added the next tutorial in my XNA role playing game tutorials to my web site. In this tutorial I got started on adding items to the map for the player to pick up. I plan on having the next part of the tutorial up on my site shortly. You can find the link to the latest tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of my web site.

I would also like to tell you about a project that I have recently started with XNA. I have found while developing games that I do a lot of the same methods when it comes to input. I decided to make a game library to handle all of the input needs of my games. I have dubbed the library Xin, which stands for XNA Input. This small library will handle all input for both Windows and Xbox 360 games. In Windows there is support for the mouse, keyboard and the Xbox 360 controller. Since the Xbox 360 does not support a mouse that feature is disabled for the Xbox 360. I'm making this project available to any developer who may be interested in it. It is still in the early stages but when it gets closer to completetion I will let you know more about it.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Next tutorial will be delayed a little

Welcome back!

Unfortunately the next tutorial in the XNA RPG series will be delayed just a little. I have a few things that I will need to attend to over the next few days. I have much of the code done, and some of the writing, but there is still a fair bit to do for both. I hope to have this done by the the end of the weekend though, if at all possible.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Working on the next XNA RPG tutorial

Welcome back!

I have been working on the latest tutorial in my XNA RPG tutorial series. I'm working on adding in items for the player to pick up. This will be a multi-part tutorial because there is a lot to go into it. I have the items rendering, and a much better image for the chest to draw. I'm working on handling the collision of the player's sprite and the items. I will be adding a screen that the game will go to when the player touches an item. I thought that would be the best way to handle picking up items.

I'm also working on updating my web site where I'm hosting these tutorials. I've created an archive of old new items, though I don't have all of the news items that I removed from the news page. I'm working on creating archives for old blog posts from the XNA GPA Blog page.

Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures

Monday, February 1, 2010

Didn't move today

Welcome back!

I decided to put off moving for another month. I will be moving to a new server in the near future though. I will let you know when I make the move. I am hoping to have the last parts of my screen manager with XNA tutorial available on my web site tomorrow. I'm also going to write a tutorial about creating an input manager with XNA for your games. What I plan to do with that is to make a game library out of it that you will be able to just add it to your game. I'm not familiar with the Zune yet, as I don't have one, so I won't be including support for that in the XNA input manager. I will have it so that it will work for both the Xbox 360 games and with Windows games.

I will also try and have the next XNA RPG tutorial ready soon. I believe I mentioned that I'm planning on adding in picking up items off the map. Items will be placed in a chest and the chest will be able to hold multiple items and gold. You will be able to have the amount of gold fixed or you can specify a random range for the gold. You will also be able to specify that the chest will have no gold or the chest will have no items at all. I will eventually be making an XML document that you will be able to read in, using the XNA Content Pipeline, the items and stuff in the chest. I have plans for a variety of items for the game as well.

If you have been following I told you I'm participating in a game programming challenge at Game Institute. For the challenge I'm making a fake 3D RPG type game with XNA. For this game I'm using XNA 3.1. What I mean by fake 3D is that unlike 3D games today I will not be using any 3D models found in typical games or other 3D things. It will all be simulated. Just wanted to give you a peek at what I've been up to for that.



Jamie McMahon
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Proud member of Dream.In.Code
XNA Game Programming Adventures