Ziggyware.com is one of the best sites for XNA resources and has been around since the beginning.  It including Articles, Tutorials, News and even an Image of The Day section where you can look at what other people are doing.

But that’s not all. One of the things that sets Ziggyware apart from others is that about two or three times each year, it holds a “XNA Articles Competition”. The result of this competition usually takes form in lots of top-quality tutorials and articles about stuff you can do with XNA. Ziggyware wants to repay the talented people that make these tutorials, so he gives them prizes. Because of this, from time to time, there’s a call for donations, and now is such a time.

If you like to use the articles on Ziggyware, and if you want to help the site grow, prosper and continue to provide a constant stream of good XNA articles, you now have the chance to do so, by going on Ziggy’s site, and seeing how you can help.

I’m currently a bit out of action at the mo which is hampering my efforts to get anything done but It seems even my good friend Charles from Dark Omen games has been plundering on without my help now and created some interesting Blender results with his own hands and imagination, check it out here on his blog, there is another video on the same concept which just freaks me out.

So,as I have mentioned before, I am part of a group called Dark Omen Games, and we have finally got around to getting a Creators Club Premium membership so we can start to release our games on the Xbox Live Creators Games.

As my post title suggests, the first game we are putting up is Nebulon, the brain child of Dave Bonner.

Nebulon is a 2D top down shooter, you fly your ship around looking for alien “photons” to warp in so you can shoot them. You have to be quick though, they like to gang up and if to many get together there is the chance of a wormhole opening up and something nasty coming out..

Here are a few screen shots:

As you can see it can get pretty funky.

Here is a clip (pre play test drop):

If you have a Creators Club Premium account, please get on a give it a play test, we really would love to hear your feed back on it so we have a solid, robust game going into peer review.

You can leave your comments here, on the play test forum for Nebulon or on our blog.

So get your trigger fingers at the ready and start blasting some photons!

  Looks like some people have been watching the new Star Trek film just a few times....

Posted on DeJohn's blog is a screenshot of the new "Loading" image for your Avatar in XNA GS 3.1.  I must say it looks cool and cannot wait, I think the first thing to try is to also crate your own loading annimation.

I'm all for just changing it to a Red colour, got to Love those Kilngon transporters.

Quote

http://blogs.msdn.com/dejohn/archive/2009/05/11/what-to-do-while-an-avatar-loads.aspx

Well I’ve been busy of the last week and even more so today.  I’ve finally setup my new blog (the old one will remain for now as I’ve stated) and got a little intro up there already.  Not to get too excited yet though, I’m still working on chapter 1 for the 3D modeling tutorial, but it’s coming along nicely.  I’m always very critical when it comes to the beginning of such things as if you don't set the stage properly and get everyone to understand the terminology to be used, you can get in to all sorts of troubles later on.

Still if you want to know how I've got here, it’s an interesting read.  yuck.

On another note, further to my introduction to Dark Omen Games, I’ve dropped a little note on the new website for our merry little band, absolutely no mentions of Kate Winslet’s acceptance speech at all, hmmm.

So if your still interested to follow my ramblings in this world and a little 3D tutorial nonsense, find me over here at http://faux-motion.blogspot.com/

For a little something to slip in to while I get the first post read, head over to Stromcode, Rick Strom has a few Blender tutorials there which are pretty good IMHO, a bit more of a do as I say tutorial rather than a learn how to do, but it’s good to walkthrough nonetheless.

Another honorable mention (thanks to Charles “RandomChaos” Humphrey again), is that there is a special XNA Exporter for Blender, which can be found on the Triple B Games site, this python script sorts out your Blender export and even adds collision boundaries for your models, saving you time calculating them in game (if that’s what you need), always worth a look.

That’s it from me here for now, so see you over at Faux motion in the future, don’t forget to update your blogroll.

This is Darkside signing out (of spaces for now)

2008 was not a good year for me.  Work ramped up to 1000% and my family got a surprising present before the year had even begun.  This did not bode well for my progress as a game developer so I became what is referred to as a slacker .

I could moan, whimper and hide under a rock or I could move on.  I choose the latter and so on with 2009. (got to stop writing 2008, have had to correct myself several times now)

Now I’ve not been totally remiss last year, I have kept up to date with all the recent developments in XNA and beyond, I have also been designing heavily and helping out others with their designs (although not much coding work), I just didn’t post about it much.  A few of the major points were:

1. I joined Dark Omen Games (curtsey of my good friend Charles (randomchaos) Humphrey with a bit of arm twisting ) and have already contributed a little bit with new game designs and ear bending’s), even added some more resources to the group.  I hope to continue this more and more as the year goes on. (BTW, Charles has a fantastic series going on about HLSL, so worth a peek over there!, he has also revived his old Blog for some C++ stuff, I don’t know where he finds the time)
2. I’ve started heavily designing an upgrade for my old Hack-1 project, it’ll probably be a complete rewrite but keeping to the same game ideas
3. Finally, I’ve waded whole heartedly in to Modeling (the 3D software type, none of that underwear or skin tight lycra malarkey).  I’ve been soaking myself up in all the 3D training material I could find including come commercial stuff (I actually paid for something, gahh)

So what for 2009?

Well the 2 goals I’ve set for myself are to make a major dent in the development of an improved Hack-1 project which when finished will probably be published under the Dark Omen Game banner.  I’ll blog as much as I can about that, taking a lead of my new Dark Omen buddies and see if I can pull a video or two together during the progress.

Secondarily, I’m going to comprise a new 3D modeling tutorial.  this seems to be an area lacking in the XNA community (or most other places unless you watch all the big heavy 3D sites).  The tutorials will not be in just one product either, it will feature 3DS Max for sure and will likely include Blender and maybe Truespace or the XSI mod tool.  this is a heavy demand on me so please be patient.

In the 3D Modeling series I'll cover:

• Basic terminology – what things are called and why
• Generic interfaces – get to know your way around each product
• Basic modeling techniques – Simple stuff to get you started
• Texturing – make it look pretty :-)
• Materials – make it look shiny
• Animation – get your body moving

This is by no means a fixed schedule and you will notice there's no dates there, reason being I’m still learning myself.  So like I did when I started this blog, you’ll be learning as I do (a few steps behind so I can make all those beginner mistakes and fix them).

I am no stranger to 3D modeling but I do have to get myself back up to date, you may think showing multiple tools at the same time is going to be tricky, but it's not that bad really, they all use very similar terminology and the thing you really need to get under your belt when modeling are the techniques rather than the tools.  Sure there are some application specific things but the basics (and even some of the advanced stuff) is fairly common in all tools.

Lastly

now with all this going on there is one last thing I will be doing before all this starts.   The blog is going to move (or at least most of the new stuff), this old blog with remain and I will still update it from time to time (and even reference some of my old stuff) but for my main blogging I’ll be using the new one (or maybe 2 depending on the speed of Hack-1 stuff).

Reason I’m doing this is because I finally became sick as hell  of all the junk appearing on the spaces site, I’ve got to constantly monitor the site and the comments that appear.   It’s supposed to be managed and controlled to stop spammers but more and more I come back to check on it (either before making a post or just from looking at my homepage) to find umpteen amounts of sales or spam comments or stuff just randomly appearing on my posts.  No matter what you do it always comes back, so I’ve had enough.

My next post on this blog will be the new address when I’ve chosen a new one (I've had a few good suggestions so far but not tried them yet)

Don’t forget to go and visit Charles either on his XNA-UK blog or his old BlogSpot one.

So Merry Christmas (for those of you who haven’t touched a computer since leaving work for the break) and a Happy new Year to you all, here’s hoping I hear more from you and that I get on with something (other than work and family, time for more time for me!)

P.S. Just in case my work reads this, I’m not putting off work, I’m just going to work even harder on myself.  Just not doing less (well  hopefully you get the picture)

On another note, i must admit I also have to try and spend more time on my charitable work as I also look after a blog site for my sons charity, the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association.   It’s only been going a Year but it’s doing well with a few contributors now and I still need to add more myself whilst looking after it.  If you’re curious what PWS is, then have a look on the site or the Charities main page here. (Don’t even bother if your a Spammer, I’m watching out for you!!! )

The Mythical Blender 2.5 project is finally getting momentum and great progress! Currently over 90k of the 300k lines that needed to be recoded are back. Not to say we're on one-third of the work though...  the new system requires to wrap or recode every (!) tool in Blender. Luckily this kind of work now is getting well defined, and interesting smaller tasks are available for all developers interested to help porting now.

To summarize; here's the highlights what Blender 2.5x will bring you:

• New window-manager, allowing multi-window setups.
• New area-manager, allowing flexible division in sub-regions with each a distinctive task (like toolbars, button list views, channel views, etc).
• The new area-manager will allow much easier custom editors (via python or C api)
• New event system, based on 'handlers' with dynamic (= user definable) keymaps. Events will much better support other devices, or multi-touch even.
• The new event system will also allow Macros, basic construction history, and since events are hanled centrally (separated from drawing) the UI will remain fully responsive (updated) while editing.
• Generic "data api", giving uniform access to data properties for Blender's UI, for Python, but especially for animation curves or drivers. This will enable the "get everything animated" feature.
• Generic "tools api", which gives uniform access to every tool (option) Blender has. Together with the "data api" this will make scripting in Python much easier. Customizable UIs (toolbars, headers, menus, buttons) are simply possible  this  way

Currently, focus is on first bringing back a working Blender. Don't expect immediately a completely new interface design, especially how buttons or tools and toolbars will work is for later. It's also good for our team to get first more familiar with the new system before working on recoding the UI side. Needless to say, with the new 2.5 architecture such work is much more efficient.
However, what's going to be improved is at least Ipos and Actions. The first will become more generic (everything animatable), the latter will be converted to a more powerful Dopesheet. Work is also being done on improving the file-selecting window (integrated with image previews), and  there's a new "data browser" to directly edit any property. I bet we'll find more fun goodies to improve while porting over old code!
For those interested to see our work, or to get involved:
wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Blender2.5
Help is always welcome!
But for now, enjoy the holidays and the last days of 2008. And thanks to everyone who has worked on 2.5 sofar (special kudos to Brecht, Nathan, Joshua, Campbell, Andrea, Diego for their significant contributions on 2.5)! Happy new year!
December 24, 2008

Blender3d.org: Latest News

Last year, I mentioned about EA releasing the fabulous (of it’s time) game that started a whole raft of other like minded games (that sounded better in my head :-) ), it was Command and Conquer.

Now here he are and they have decided that since Red Alert 3 is coming along nicely, they’d like to remind you what the hell the series was about and to this end they have now released Red Alert 1 for FREE.

Also if your really good and pre order Red Alert 3, they will also furnish you with a full series copy of Red Alert 2

Red Alert 1 in case you don’t remember brought in the wonderful idea, that with this big expanse of water around most battle fields, it might be nice to use that to bombard the enemy from afar, laughing away at the ground based troops who could on hide and cower and unable to reach them (at least until your subs could pop up and blow them to smithereens) or to be able to sneak troops aground the enemy's flank by water and drop them straight into your base if you weren’t careful.  Usually promoting such phrases as “Where’s my construction site gone!”.

Although unlike last time there are no novelty gifts available, pah.

With Red Alert 3 looking like a nice new puppy waiting for you to buy it by looking so lovely in the shop window, and it it looking damn fine at the moment (I really like the Empire of the rising sun, the new 3'd playable enemy), make me think back to my old faithful friend with fond memories and eager to walk into the shop and pick up that new dog.

Here's hoping that house training wont be so messy this time.

On another Note

An annoying thing has been plaguing my site recently, unfriendly people are starting to make me administer my blog with a lot more vigour, they having been commenting on random posts (usually old'ish ones) with shameless advertising.  Or worse, in a language other than on my site, which when I look into it, turns out to be more advertising, or worse (I have enough Viagra thank you and don’t need yet another supplier.  that amount being none, thank you very much)

A Last Mention

If you have not heard already, next week see's the final Beta for XNA Game Studio 3.0 (not long to the full version now).  This release is pretty much feature complete, although publishing to the XBOX is still not available, most likely because they need to update the BOX side it' self and like the last version update, this usually breaks compatibility.  With DreamBuildPlay nearly finished, I can well understand the need to wait (Since it is all being showcased on XNA 2).

Maybe next year and the net contest, we ay see categories for games and not just one overall winner, would be good to have classes for PC, XBOX and Zune as separate categories.  maybe even one category for and all in one (a game that can be deployed to all 3 platforms, albeit a bit tricky)

Make me want to finally find some time and get back to programming goodness (if only work would ease off), in Case your wondering I'm writing this blog now from Chennai in India, where my work delights on sending me quiet frequently to keep our outsourced development arm moving (well moving in approximately the right direction at least).  I Don’t mind it and it is a great experience to some here but I do miss the wife and kids.  (and not having any personal life working all hours here :-(|)

I recommend as well popping over to Sharky's Blog, as he's gone and got himself an interview with a Mag - published here.  Well worth a read as it reminds me of my own background (which is surprisingly similar, especially how I got into XNA).  Also good to see all the hard work he is putting into Sharky's Air Legends which is also his Dream Build Play entry this year.

TTFN

One of the issues I (and from the look on the XNA blogs around) have always had problems getting into 3D modelling, usual problems being:

• Lack of cash (all the big houses cost a small fortune)
• Lack of skill (steep learning curve)
• No design ability at all :-)

Now while I can not do much about the last one and the second can at least be offset with training (but which impacts the time I have to build my killer game).

Now I could just drag in an artist (which depending on your friends circle can also cost cash) or grab free models of the community sites (such as Turbosquid, but the good one’s cost cash again).

So leaving money behind I can embark on the search for a free 3d Modelling tool, so looking around we have:

• Blender (free, powerful, tricky interface and not very intuitive.  Exports are tricky to use in XNA)
• Softimage XSI (Again free, has XNA integration, some training but still a bit clunky to use and importing seems hit and miss)
• Google Sketchup (free and an importer has just been written for XNA, although I've not played with it Much)
• Truespace 3d

Hold on, Truespace, Doesn't that cost $600, why is that in the list.

Well, no longer does Truespace cost you any cash whatsoever now that Microsoft has acquired Calgari.

Since Microsoft Bought it in order to offer a competitive product to Goolge's sketchup, they have now released it for free, there's also some nice training material and other free stuff.

See here

It also supports the following formats

Wavefront
.obj

Stereo Lithography
.stl

Autocad
.dxf

X format
.X

Illustrator and Postscript
.ai
.ps
.eps

BVH motion capture
.bvh

3D Studio files:
.3ds
.prj
.asc

.lwb, .lwo
.geo
.iob
.sob

So as you can see it supports the .X format for exporting to XNA, but it also supports the 3d Studio format, so if you find any good 3d studio community models, you no longer need full 3d Studio to use them (there's $3000 saved already), what's also strange is that it also supports Autocad, so if you happen to work in a CAD office you can also reuse your work?

And if your interested you can also import your creations to Virtual Earth, which is what it was intended for but hay, XNA can benefit as well!.

I always promised I wouldn't do this but here I am.

XNA Game Studio V3 CTP is now out and available.

Grab it here from the Microsoft Download site

BUT!!!!!.  <- there's usually a but with something this big

Buyer beware on this one and dont forget the small print.  Using this CTP will not allow you to deploy to XBOX and PC deployments will only work under the CTP binaries.

Quote from the Download site

Competitions are always a good thing as they make people strive to compete and bring out their best work (or not in my case, hack-1 was never finished enough for my likes when i published it for the XBOX360Homebrew Contest).

Time being what it is these days there's no way I can drag myself through another competition, but thankfully there are people who can, in this case Ziggy has started up yet another Tutorial contest over on his Ziggyware site.

This has always been hugely popular in the past and provided many excellent tutorials, feel free to also browse through the results of the other contest, lots of good stuff for everyone from beginner to experienced XNA developers.

P.S I'm still going to be routing for Catalin Zima, mainly because his work is great and he has won the last few comps ;-), Sorry to disappoint anyone else, you just have to step up your game!! (that means YOU!!!)

More from George

On the flip side George Clingerman has been reinventing himself of late (lie Madonna but with a little less makeup) and hes been rewriting a lot of his old tutorials, the latest series to get the revitalisation treatment is his Wizard tutorial series.

	Wizard Says Hi!	Wizard gets asked to take a bath
	Wizard hides from bath	Wizard shoots at person asking him to take a bath

This tutorial takes a walk through the 2D park and is currently focusing on character development (displaying a sprite and giving it actions and things to do), the series looks as promising as ever and knowing George, should have a few nice extra surprises along the way.  So keep a lookout on Georges Developments over @ XNADevelopment.com (now that he seems to be taking a rest from being constantly on for forums to do some actual Work!!)

Time being what it is, I seem to have less and less to play with.  One of the biggest casualties has been my Game Development progress, including this blog.  That is not to say I've stopped completely (9i'v still got my hands in and do my best to keep up to date with everything going on, especially with the XNA 2 release and the new developments with WiiWare) but time is just diverted to other things such as below.

  Little Baby Nathan Samuel found his way into the world on DEC 28th despite all the odds stacked against him, lovely as he is. (and in case your wondering, that now makes 4, including 1 accident and 1 miracle, as in shouldn't have been medically possible after 3 years, damn human body :-))

Work is the other Factor which has been hell of late, deadlines approaching and such.  At least Charles over at RandomChaos has been holding up the Lanky Brit front and has been releasing some great content, we chat regularly and I am truly amazed by what he has achieved in a short span of time.  his blog recently moved on to the every successful XNAUK user group site, lots going on there as well.

The latest release from RandomChaos, the enhanced GameStateManager V2.

The Main XNAUK User group site, well worth a look.

As for the future, I'm focusing on what I can, scratching up designs for games (pad and pen easier to come by and doesn't annoy the wife) and checking out the background devising for the games while keeping up to date with all new things.  (my blog list is far tooo long).

For the last if anyone is wondering what the heck my new logo is, then visit this link and shout out "Microsoft, Change the world or go home".  New/old way of thinking of how to get a job not only done but done well and in a way that is productive.  Either that or do it right or get lost!, has several meanings.

Nope I'm not drunk and your not dreaming.

The game that started a lot of peoples like for fast paced Strategy fondness and quite a few late nights (for me) playing against your friend (amassing a lot of tanks and laughing gleefully as they run straight over your fiends enemy base, ROFL) is now available for free.

EA are distributing the original ISO's for both the GDC and NOD campaigns (hopefully without the copy protection, else that would be just daft), which you can burn to CD and relive all the delights of a time gone by.

**Warning this game is likely to set back your game development project by quiet a few hours**

SO enjoy and head over to EA's page and play and play and then play some more.

Meet you on the match server!!!!, mwuhahhahahaha

Oh and on another note you can now also purchase your own Kane bobble-head doll to punch or hug depending on which camp you feel at home in.  Hmmm.

And another even more freaky occurrence, Kane has made an appearance on YouTube of all places from http://www.kanelives.org/.  Now that is just spooky.

It's not that often that I'll comment on other peoples game ideas in my own blog but today is an exception.

Ever thought about jotting your dreams down as soon as you wake up, then take those dreams to create an interesting game.  I used to jot down my dreams for a while when I was younger, in the end got scared and thought it best that they were left for my subconscious to worry about, although I might start again now after reading what Danc has been doing.

Over on the Lost Garden blog, he has been doing just this and in one particular dream actually play testing his final work on a new game (that he hadn't written yet, spooky.  Quick call Maulder and Scully!), quickly after waking up he's jotted it all down and come out with what looks like a unique idea for a game.

"Celestial Music" is a cause and effect game involving music, music that is between planets.  The design is well thought out and sounds good.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Lost Garden: Celestial Music and see what all the fuss is about.

Like quiet a few developers these days, I like nothing more that sitting in the garden or relaxing on the couch (sofa) when I'm fumbling over some code, this is a bit hard to do with my trusty power hungry workhorse dev PC (just doesn't feel nice to carry around in a backpack you know! :-)).

So, most of my coding gets done on my back friendly laptop, mine in particular has the frumpy Intel 945GSM chipset (which although Intel keep saying it supports full Shader 2.0 stuff, it don't), A Dell D610 with 1Gb of memory (should be enough shouldn't it)

SO after downloading the nice new SHIP starter kit game from the XNA Creators Club site (whoohoo, my Creators club membership is still active) and installed the new sample, lo and behold, my poor laptop chipset just couldn't cut it.

BUT, that didn't stop it from making it work!, so here's how to get it running on some older Shader 2.0 machines (or laptops like mine). 

But it Compiles, why wont it run

Thing is when you get the Ship game out of the box and compile it, it will run.  Except that at first you get kicked out for having a naff Graphics card without Pixel Shader 2.0A support.

First things first

First off the game is code limited to check the capability of your graphics card, to check under the hood and give you the thumbs up or down, one of the shaders (which I'll come to later) requires PS2.0A support.  My laptop doesn't (it only falsely things it supports full 2.0, liar!!), so easiest way around this is to simply comment out the Pixel Shader check.

In the Constructor for the ShipGame class (shipgame.cs) you will find these two lines, just comment out the first one as I have done here!

//graphics.MinimumPixelShaderProfile = ShaderProfile.PS_2_A;
graphics.MinimumVertexShaderProfile = ShaderProfile.VS_1_1;

Well that's all well and good, my game will now ignore the capabilities of my graphics card.

Damn, My game no longer compiles.

Good old MS build is intelligent to note that without the minimum support options it needs to check the game will now work for your machine specifically and without the Pixel Shader 2.0A support, it wont.

You will now get a nice warning error about a maximum instruction limit with one of your Shader files, Blur.fx

The Culprit

When you open the Shader Blur.fx (located in ShipGameWindows\Content\Shaders\blur.fx), the first thing you'll do is scroll down to the end of the FX file and look at the instruction version of the Vertex and Pixel Shader techniques.

In the Blurhorrizontal and BlurHorizontalSplit techniques you will see these lines

pass P0
{          
    VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 MainVS( );
    PixelShader  = compile ps_2_A BlurHorizontalSplitPS( ); 
}

Now at this point, like so many others, I just changed the PixelShader version and hoped for the best

pass P0
{          
    VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 MainVS( );
    PixelShader  = compile ps_2_0 BlurHorizontalSplitPS( ); 
}

Off I went and re-compiled the solution.

What the heck, it didn't work

Well of course it didn't work.  Even though most of the time, changing the version of the Pixel Shader will work, in this case it can't, simply because the shader is trying to do too much for the card to handle.

Lucky for us though it's not using any specific HLSL language elements from PS 2.0A.  The problems lies in just how much work the shader is asking the graphics card to do.

The Final fix, do less to get more

if only everything in life could simply be fixed with doing less to get more, or in this get get anything at all.

Now where the problem lies with my poor old graphics card is here

float4 color = float4(0,0,0,0);
for( float i=-BLUR_RANGE;i<=BLUR_RANGE;i++ )
{
    float2 tc = TexCoord + float2(i*g_PixelSize.x, 0);
    
    float4 c = tex2D(ColorSampler, tc);
    
    c.xyz *= c.w;
    
    color += c;
}
return color/(2*BLUR_RANGE+1);

You will notice this loop is dependant on the following variable

#define BLUR_RANGE 5

This variable tells the shader just how much BLUR effect to impose on the scene it is shading, in our case it's just too much and exceeds the shader instruction limit for my laptops graphics card.

SO all we have to do to make this run on our machines, is to limit how much BLUR should be drawn on our screen, hay it may not look as pretty as it could be, but it will now work.

So simply change the above line to

#define BLUR_RANGE 2

Whoohoo, I'm now playing a Descent 2 clone

After you have compiled and run the code, you will now get the (almost) full experience of what the Ship game does, with all the nifty power up's and the seemingly endless (not) levels.

I'm glad how much stuff the XNA team has put into this sample game and more importantly just how much they left wide open, there are loads of areas where any budding new beginner can now just in and start adding more and more features on the framework they have supplied.

My only gripe, is that they didn't also ship the RAW models for the FBX's that were shipped with the game, although the FBX editors can read them, it's much better to work with the original file format for the editor (especially if they used the new version of XSI Softmod!!)

SO what are you waiting for, get out there and start modding.  (Garden and couch optional)

P.S

Don't know if anyone else get the same problem, but my Ship jerks around (as in it jumps every second or so, not that its a jerk!!), could be the fix but I ain't looked properly yet, keep looking.

Seems a few guys now are really dishing it out to the public and rolling out their sweat 'n' guts and slitting their writs for the community.

Especially now 2 community developer have released their full source code for their game engines.

First off is RandomChaos's engine, the main advantage of this one is that it's written completely in C# and build in XNA.  on the downside it is still fairly immature but still packs a load of features.

Charles though has also released a load of samples for his engine as well with the promise of even more to come, so head over to his Blog and check it out

http://randomchaosuk.blogspot.com/

on another front (just today in fact which prompted this rapidly typed blog) Nuclex has release his Game engine, it's been 3 years in development with some 40,000 lines of code with a lot of helpful English commenting.  Nuclex admits the engine is not complete but there is a hell of a lot in there but, the engine is written completely in C++, so if you want to use it in XNA then your likely going to need to port over what you need (unless by some miracle we can now use compiled libraries on the 360, unlikely).  PC XNA's will still be able to use it however and it is quiet advanced.

So have a browse offer to Nuclex's site and see what's on offer!

http://www.nuclex.org/news/2007/07/30/the-original-nuclex-engine-cxx

2 Posts in one week, what must I be thinking, ?? anyway

I suppose I thought this couldn't wait, after my last post about researching in-game AI and finding that wonderful site AIGameDev, something magical happened. 

Usually most of the information on the site and all the recent post have always been about the theory for AI, which always started sparks in your mind of all the fantastic things you could do with it, path-finding, machine learning, concurrent behaviors.  Visualising all the snazzy reactions you could put in your game to make it more fun and challenging, but it was all just theory and down to you to implement.  Granted there were a few examples but it did feel like being back in college sometimes, lots to learning which required a lot of thought to digest.

Now Alex J Chapandard (the site author) has released the source code to what he calls Game::AI++, which is basically a work in progress AI engine written in C++ AND FULLY COMMENTED, basically a code based tutorial for AI, here's what he has to say for the release:

A few weeks ago, I promised to release the whole source code of Game::AI++
to subscribers of this newsletter on August 1st, so here it is!

I will certainly spend many more months working on this project, but the time
has come to let it face the world regardless of emotions -- and watch it fall
flat on its face if necessary :)  Release often, release early.

What NOT to Expect
------------------
* Production ready code... It'll take a few more iterations to reach that.
* Code to start learning game AI. The goal is industrial-strength :)
* A visual 3D demo; I'm working on that separately.  Stay tuned!
What to Expect
--------------
* A solid framework but a user API that needs some feedback!
* Full C++ source with 1:1 ratio of lines of code to comments on average.
* Roughly ~100 automated tests, including a few mini-tutorials.
* A simple Overview document, a User Guide, and an API reference.
Don't Miss These
----------------
* There are a few well commented demos in docs/examples/
* See the User Guide in docs/guide.html
* The important code is in Scheduler.* and Sequence.*
How to Help
-----------
I'd appreciate comments on the following:
* What parts of the architecture don't you understand?
* How can the current user-level API be improved?
* Did all the automated tests pass on your hardware?
If you're interested in getting involved with programming, email me.
Download
--------
It's available in .zip and .tgz formats.  The code builds with VS
Express and Eclipse CDT.
http://aigamedev.com/downloads
Email me if you have any questions, comments or feedback!
Alex

Fantastic stuff and this is only his first release, the visual stuff sounds great as well.

Enjoy all!

One day I'll get back into my regular blog cycle, but today is not that day.

Work is a real task master, I've set-up a new Community Site for my son's genetic disability (Prader-willie syndrome) and maintaining that takes a considerable chunk of my time, on top of that, against all odd's my wife is now pregnant again, despite it not supposedly being possible, so that's number 4 on the way now (ouch!).

So finding time to actually do game development is challenging (against using free time to actually play games) but is very fun and in light of George Clingerman's "becoming a better developer" goals, I decided to re-scope my activities and took a step back.

Now I'm probably not going as far as George did but I did have a re-think of my goals and how to get there, so in this I've gone back to basics, so far back actually I've signed up the the GameDev.net C# workshop for learning C#, from the point of view that you can never learn enough about a subject.  I do feel there are some parts of the C# language I've missed out on (interfaces, conditional operators and the finer arts of generics, to name a few) and some better coding standards.

Check out the GameDev.Net C# workshop course.

On other fronts I've scaled back my graphical adventures in favor of what I'm good at for now and started looking into Procedural Development and AI.

AI sort of caught me off guard when I found AIGameDev.com

It's a fantastic site delving into some pretty complex themes with AI, everything from path-finding to concurrent behavior trees, any one interested in AI should pay a visit.

On other fronts (just today) I came across another new training initiative for 3D modeling.

3D model builder is an interactive 3D modeling course, which unlike the training plans for tools like Blender (which you should probably read first for your tool anyway), this site focuses on making more complex models, from Basic cubes and triangles to faces and architecture.

As far as my procedural content work goes, research is pretty tough, if you plan to look down this root then get your maths head on as its a rough ride.

So unlike George, I've just made a roadmap without timescale's for things to work towards, although with it being me, I've opted for a parallel plan so I can work on what I have time for.

Now back to my blog list and all the lovely DreamBuildPlay entries, Man some of those games are definitely something to aspire to, especially "Shuggy", which takes a very simple idea and runs amuck with it, sorta like watching the Little Britain guys and never knowing what to expect.

I'm not taking credit here or rushing out to the shops, but you must of heard by now on the XNA Team blog, if you haven't, here it is!!.

Michael Klucher
Program Manager – XNA Community Game Platform Team

XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh has been released and is available for download right now! For members of the XNA Creators Club, you’ll be receiving a Title Update on your Xbox 360 console that will update XNA Game Launcher to the newest release. If you’re not ready to move to 1.0 Refresh on Windows, don’t worry; the Xbox 360 version is compatible with 1.0 and 1.0 Refresh.

We’ve gone over many of the features outlined in the announcement we made at GDC 2007. One thing we didn’t really cover previously is compatibility. The entire team made a conscious effort to maintain compatibility with this release.

• Your game should just recompile in 1.0 Refresh with no changes required.
• Any game that is compiled should run fine if you have 1.0 Refresh installed.
• As mentioned, you can continue to use 1.0 on your Windows computer with 1.0 Refresh on the Xbox 360 console.
• Games that are built on 1.0 Refresh may run on 1.0; however, if you are using new functions or features in the XNA Framework (such as font functionality), it will not work properly.

You can download the XNA Framework 1.0 Refresh for including in your installer as you start to upgrade your games.

Finally, please make sure to take a look at the readme for any last minute information about the release. We’d love your feedback on this release, so please head over to the XNA Creators Club forums and leave a message.

So what are you waiting for?