Ido Samuelson's blog

My blog in Jive (gizoogle)

If you haven't seen gizoogle yet. You better check it up!!!

You can also read my blog translated to jive here

XNA Lode Runner 360 - progress

 Although my recent posts are about this game progress, I really don't work much on it. (~2hrs every other day).

Here is a recent ANimated gif update of the game:

Now you can really see the gold sparkling animation.

Changes:

• Element Shadowing - Fixed.
• Monks now have a brain (i'm actually going to implement a better AI for the experts).
• Ability to (P)ause and Resume(anykey) the game. (In the feature it is going to display a menu)

Bugs:

• Monk's Brain(still have some edges open).
• Level does not apear in the center of the screen.

XNA - Creating Tile Engine tutorials

XNA Resources have published some great beginner's tutorials for creating a Tile Engine.

Pillar

Source: http://xkcd.com/c32.html

If you are familier with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) you allready know that reality is individual. What can I say? We live in a mutli-reality world. Hmmm so a particle can be in two places at the same time (in my reality and in your reality, or in my reality and my thought about reality...). Quantum Phisics...I stop here!

XNARunner - continues

 As more I work with the XNA Framework the more I like it. Although it still beta and miss a lot of functionality (I would really want a Live Network Access), the ease of creating a game (for me...) was never better.

I will update my blog with screenshots of XNARunner development progress.

Here is a recent screenshot of the game :

Changes:

• Element Shadowing - Elements like Hero, Monk (enemy), Brick, Ladder, Rope all have shasows now.
• Hero display.
• Monks display.

Bugs:

• Element Shadow override some elements. I am going to fix it by adjusting the drawing Rectangle on a Shadow when it has a different element type below it in the level grid.
• Level does not apear in the center of the screen. For now I use 800x600 , I want to have something generic to translate from a level position to a screen position...

My first XNA game in progress...

One of the latest interesting things i've been doing is learning the XNA Framework.

"The XNA Framework is the set of .NET libraries that developers will code against to build their games."

The core layer of the XNA Framework provide a cross platform programming model for accessing Graphics, Audio, Input, Math, and Storage (More will be added). So it is VERY easy to handle graphics (2D and 3D) as well as Inputs such as Keyboard, mouse and even the xbox 360 controller. Did I mention? The games will be able to run on the xbox 360, further this is all done in C#!!!

There were very good discussion on will a managed enviorment such as .NET will be able to run a high performance game such as Halo, you should really check the answer on the XNA Framework Forum. (I learned that parts of Unreal are actually written in an interperter, script language).

Currently the XNA Framework is running on Visual C# Express (Some allready tweaked it...)

If you can't hold yourself and want to try it out:

Visual C# Express : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/

XNA Studio Express:http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gse/

Microsoft Direct X SDKhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/sdk/

Source for Mech Commander 2, which Microsoft made freely available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6D790CDE-C3E5-46BE-B3A5-729581269A9C&displaylang=en

I'm really not familier with game programming that much, but it is something that very interest me. Since allmost anyone in the community who is working with XNA these days allready develop a Pong game. I decided to do something else as a challange. I'm going after Load Runner.

So far I've been able to load the levels and change between them using keybaord shortcuts - Control+N(next level) / Control+P(previous level). Further am displaying the Gold with shining animation exactly how it was with the Original game.

Here is how it looks so far:

This is going to be so great playing it on the xbox 360!