Archives for : 2010-07
This was mostly painful because I hate hacking around with linuxy opensource tools with specific outdated version requirements. I ranted about it here.
Release Notes:
* Migrate from XNA 4.0 CTP to XNA 4.0 Beta. (broke skinnedeffect?)
* Drew model of female in Paint.Net
* Outlined as 3dshape, added basic depth in SketchUp
* Imported to Blender as dae. Exported as fxp (PAINFUL!!!!)
* Scaled down 0.0005times (why?) and rotated to be vertical.
How difficult do you think it is to get a 3d Model from a very common simple modeling program into a simple well documented game platform? Hard, very hard.
Google’s Sketchup is a new friendly approach to creating models and I quite enjoy it. However my options for exporting are limited until I pay 500 for a Pro edition. Hoping there was a way around this on the internet (I can’t be the only one) I have found some dae to fbx converters and other walkthroughs on how to do the process.
My UI is shaping up with clickable 2D floating areas. It was a bit of a challenge to project their space to screen space based on rotations and camera swapping.
Another challenge was to get my UI to render on top of everything. I ended up disabling the default depthstencilstate. Also it was kinda messed up to render a plane which was a quad, not triangles. Reviewing some basic directX principles with vertices and indices was a good exercise.
Release Notes v0.34
* Controls overlay added
* Clickable rotating rectangle zones
* PlaneGeometry rendering on top of objects
* Basic navigation actions added and hooked to controls overlay.
This version has quite a few important elements in it for my end goal of being a multiplayer game.
Firstly I textured a geometric primitive with a squiggle. I hope to make more dynamic things in the world this way since I am not prepared to do much with the 3D models other than slide them around.
But specific to the windows phone 7 platform, I set up my persistent storage saving and loading. Also specific to the wp7, specifically network protocols, I am using basic PHP queries to upload a file and download a file which is the current plan to allow for each turn to be synchronized among all players.
I found the storage to be somewhat easy to use but I really dont like web queries and also getting a PHP script to save a file was a bit of a hassle and I ended up ditching my current webhost because I ran into frustrating walls.
The other major game design feature added was the concept of a turn and the action phase.
Under the hood I am using C# events using text overlays as listeners to the gamestate events.
Release Notes v0.33
* Textured cubes with squiggle,
* Save+Load to Persistent Storage,
* Upload+Download to PHP website,
* Director statemachine for Planning and Action Phase
* Overlay Hide+Show with C# Events