If
you have visited this site in the past few days you may have noticed
that it is switching between back and fourth between dnn (DotNetNuke) and
the new site style. Whom ever says getting an asp.net application up
and running on a remote server is easy did not have my luck.
I
have been fighting and fighting trying to get the site to work properly
but keep getting bullshit errors popping up, and it's really starting
to piss me off.
So bear with me as I keep fighting with it...
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I recently purchased the ID Super pack
from steam and had a few problems getting dosbox to stop crashing upon
startup and was attempting to edit the config files to no
avail. But I now have them working perfectly. Make sure that
if you have DEP (data execution prevention) enabled to add an exception
for every dosbox.exe file for each game. It worked for me and now I can play doom, and commander keen without any problems.
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I just finished a game of CSS and a news window popped up stating that the entire ID software catalog had been made available for purchase on steam! Sweet! To bad I already purchased Doom3 and the resurrection expansion pack. But then I was thinking maybe I'll get lucky and they will allow people who have already purchased the game to prove that they have purchased it and have a way of making it available on my steam account.
Then I sent off a email to my brother letting him in on the news and dug a post on Digg.com that also made the news available. So with the thought of the id catalog being made available on steam in my mind I went and took a shower thinking nothing else of it.
About thirty minutes later I went back on my computer to watch a movie. Sat down, got comfortable with a plate of watermelon, put my earphones on and saw that I had not closed the steam store window showing Doom 3 for sale. Now sometime from that point on until just before I made this post, it's a little fuzzy, but I can remember opening up widows calculator and adding up the total price of all the ID games to verify if the total price of each game if purchased separately would be correct. Then I remember something having to do with that line from Jerry Maguire "You had me at hello."
Hello indeed. All the ID games for just $62.95, a $150 dollar savings. Maybe it was the nostalgia of commander keen and doom 1/2 that threw me, but you are now looking at the new owner of all these fine games,
• Commander Keen, Episodes 1 through 5
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Spear of Destiny
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• Ultimate DOOM
• DOOM II
• Final DOOM
• DOOM3
• DOOM3: Resurrection of Evil
• QUAKE
• QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon
• QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity
• QUAKE II
• QUAKE II Mission Pack: The Reckoning
• QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
• QUAKE III Arena
• QUAKE III: Team Arena
• Heretic
• Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
• HeXen
• HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
• HeXen II
Well I guess I can look on the bright side, at least I don't have to put the dam doom 3 disk in the cd tray just to play the game anymore. I have always wanted to play Return to castle wolfinsien and now I can! BTW the older games like wolf3d and doom 1 use the DosBox emulator to play. I played a little bit of wolf3d and spear of destiny just now and had no troubles playing under windows vista.
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Besides
slacking off these last few weeks I have started a new asp.net 2.0 web
project. Basically it will be a content resource site where users
upload there content like textures models code etc but unlike the other
sites out there I will be sharing the ad revenue I receive from the
banner ads. This should entice users to post there xna related content
and have the benefit of earning some coin from it.
I have a
working prototype of the site, but it only supports texture uploads at
the moment. Once I am satisfied with code or that part of the site it
will just be a matter of cut and paste to add additional sections for
models, tutorials, code etc.
But there is one big problem. I will be heading back up to mushroom camp
around mid august 2007, so I may or not be able to publish the first
release on the web for people to play around with and start using. So
it will be a wait and see game.
One of the reasons I started
this project is because I have recently uploaded a ton of images to
another computer art/graphics site that also shared there ad revenue
with it's users, but the problem with the site is that to many people
use it and your content quickly becomes lost in the thousands of
uploaded submissions. But with xna, the user base is a little more
confined and I am hoping because of that, that both the users and my
self can earn a little bit of extra revenue on the side. I am also
thinking about taking a different approach in how the ad revenue will
be paid out to users rather then the traditional methods.
A side
benefit of creating this site is that I will be able to make available
all of the images I have been taking with my camera. Which is about
1000+ 4.0 megapixel images.
Anyway I just thought since I have not posted on this blog in a while I would let the internets know what I have been up to...
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Not
much to say in this post other then I'm not dead yet! I have been
trying to make at least one relavant post per week but have not been
able to do that for the past month or so. And it would appear I still
don'y have anything relavent to contribute to the blogosphere. Hope you
had fun wasting your time reading this!
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If
you have been fallowing my blog and read my last post it stated that I
would have Release 2 of my xGameConsoleXNA library up and posted within
a week. Well a week has come and gone. 2 weeks, ... 3 Weeks, 4 Weeks,
... What can I say. When a person sleeps when there tired and not when
social doctrine declares when it is time, the days seem to blend into
one another and time passes. 4 whole weeks. Hmm, seems like only
yesterday that I made my last post.
Anyway it has been a busy
few weeks. The house has been sold and we need to be out by mid July,
so we have been packing and getting ready to move. And I am destined to
be home less for the next few months until the mushroom season starts
up again in late august. Which means my computer use and internet
connection will be severely limited for some time.
I have also
started working on a new project with my brother these last two weeks.
I don't want to say too much about it because it's not finished but
suffice it to say I have written some apps that have crawled over 1.2
million page links in just a few days, and out of those 625000+ are
blog related. We are thinking about creating a service and doing a
search engine designed for a select group of people, that will offer
much more detailed info that a standard Google search can. My brother
seems to think we could make up to $20,000 a month each if we can get
it working and it really starts to take off. It would also be the first
project I have worked on whose end result is intended to put some money
in my pocket. For someone who can live comfortably on less then $4800 a
year, $20,000 a month seems like millions. But until that happens it is
a wait and see game.
And lest you think I have forgotten about the xGameConsoleXNA library, check out the xGameConsoleXNA page for the link to the Release 2 download as well as some how to articles. Better late then never!
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I have gone back and finally done some more work on my xGameConsoleXNA library for the XNA platform. The next release will be Release 2 and will mainly contain updates to how the user interacts with the console.
- It can now do things like scroll through the text that was written out to the console
- Pressing the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard you can set the insertion point for typing text
- If
you type a really long line of text in the entry line that is too long
to fit within the console the text will now gracefully scroll left or
right depending on where the insertion point is
- More comments in the code as well as xml 'summery' comments for the methods
- Made a number of optomizations so some parts of the code are more simplified
- There
are some breaking changes such as some properties have been renamed to
better more understandable names. I also moved a few methods and
properties out of the console class and into the ConsoleComponent class
because they really were more suited being in the ConsoleComponent
class.
- I also added a WordWrap property to the ConsoleComponent
class so that text that gets written to the console will now wrap to
the next line if it does not fit.
I should hopefully
upload Release 2 within the next week. I would also like to mention
that I noticed some of the xGameConsoleXNA code may not be 360
compatible, even though I cannot test it on the 360 because I do not
have a creators club subscription. For example the LoadAlias command
was using the IO.File.ReadAllLines method and the 360 xna api's do not
contain the ReadAllLines method. I will try to keep an eye out for more
code like that. I modified the code so that it no longer uses the
ReadAllLines method but I will not be able to ensure that
xGameConsoleXNA will seamlessly run on the 360 until I get a creators
club subscription.
It is my intention to eventually get the
xGameConsoleXNA working on the 360 but I promised myself that I would
only purchase a creators club subscription after I had completed or had
come close to completed a working game. So yeah, being more of a tool
developer it might take me a while to get a subscription. :(
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The first release of the xMessages component
was really just a introduction to what I was working on. I have yet to
see any other components out there that does what the xMessages
component does. Anyway I updated the code (Release 2) so that it now
supports a interface driven modal so that text effects and image
effects can be created and applied to the message. I am still no where
close to being done. There are still some minor bugs here and there,
and I put a little more comments in my code. Future releases will
continue to improve the code as well as provide better documentation.
Eventually
I hope to write some content pipeline processors so that an entire
conversation can be created and stored in a xml file and then use the
content.Load method to load that whole conversations in one line of
code rather then having to write many lines of code by hand to get it
to do stuff. i am also thinking of writing a tool for authoring
conversations and saving them out to xml files so that you do not have
to write the xml files by hand. But that will not be for some time.
If you watch the updated video you can start to see what the end goal for the xMessage component is trying to achieve.
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I have posted a video of the xMessage component in action to give people a sense of what it can do. You can find the video here.
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I have added a new XNA based project to the XNA page called xMessage. The xMessages component
is designed for in game chararacter dialog to be displayed similar to
games like Final Fantasy for the NES. This component makes use of xFripperyXNA and StreamContentProcessor. Both are included in the download.
Being
the first release ther are some minor issues that still need to be
worked out, such as when the component is typing out text if the word
being drawn will not fit within the rectangle, the partly drawn word
will dissapear from the end of the line and reappear at the begining of
the next line.
Other then that the component allows an
image to be displayed with the text, and the text is also dynamically
changes acording to the size of the dialog. When running the demo use
the left mouse button to move the dialog and the right mouse button to
resize the dialog.
Future editions will have support
for animated images so your game could have a picture of a talking head
for example. As well as better text drawing support, and the ability to
display the image on the right hand side. Also planning on adding more
text drawing animations.
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