I have created a example project on the XNA page that demonstrates how to add winform controls to your game window in just a few lines of code. I created this project because I recently downloaded the winforms example project found at the XNA creators club website and found it to be rather overkill for what it does.  View Screenshot

Download the example project here. AddingWinformControlsTest.zip (38.58 kb) (XNA 3.0)

I have uploaded a few more images to the gallery. I took some pictures of Rocks, Green Algie, and Grey Sand, the pictures can be found under the "Game Art and 3D Modeling Textures" of the gallery.

There is also some pictures of the Old Skeena bridge that connects Terrace to Thornhill. They can be found under the "Places" section of the gallery called "Old Bridge Graphiti May 15, 2009" and "Terrace Mountian and Old Bridge May 15, 2009"

The gallery is running a little slow at the moment and I'm not sure why. It may still be generating thumbnails of the images. There is about 3 or more gigs of images in the gallery and about 3000+ images. If the slow download time persists then I am going to have to take another look at the code. Also you'll notivce that I didn't link directly to the new images in the gallery and that is a feature I have yet to code into the gallery.

I also added a few more project pages.

• SLPathfindaz utility library - The SLPathfindaz library is intended to provide a easy to use A* pathfinding implementation for xna.
• XNAVisies debug visualizers - The XNAVisies project is intended to provide debug visualizers for various xna types.
• xCollectiveXNA library has been updated and Release 2 is now availible. The events are now similar to the standard .NET (sender, eventargs) style. Also the code is now fully commented with xml comments.

There is still alot of work to do getting the site finished, a few theme tweaks here and there, some xna pages are not fiished being written, and a few other things I am going to try to get done in the next couple of weeks.

I am beginning to see a trend in the reliability of hp ac adapters for laptops. This is the second hp laptop I have owned and the second hp laptop ac adapter to fizzle out. Both ac adapters died after about 1.5 to 2 years of use. So I dusted off my ancient desktop tower (1Ghz, 512Mb ram, 20Gb hard drive, ATI 9200) to make this post.

I could not figure out why it was locking up on me. Not really locking up but was intermittently being pegged at 100% CPU usage. I pulled each component out separately and tested the computer. The ram, hard drive, virus scans, hard drive scans, etc. didn't seem to solve the problem. I finally managed to find a web page from other people who had similar issues, and turns out that it was the ac adapter. As soon as I pulled the cord out if the laptop and let it automatically switchover to battery power the CPU usage dropped back down to nothing. Doh!

So now I'm stuck with a computer from the time of antiquities until the new ac adapter I ordered comes in the mail. It's not all that bad really. It performs rather sporty for a 8-10 year old machine. :P

*Sigh*  World of Warcraft is consuming my days faster then I'd like it to. It's been a month already since my last post and I basically have not written a line of code in that time. I was afraid this would happen again. I would not be able to manage my time properly between wow and working on my programming projects.

"Uprising" the guild that I am in is ranked 2nd on the Sisters of Elune server and I think I play alot of wow but these guys play alot more then I do! We are all trying to get geared runing Malaygos, Sarth, naxx etc,  before the next patch adds more instances to run. It's ... "fun" ... but it is also demanding trying not to get left behind in the guild.  I placed "fun" in quotes because I still have major issues with wow and the way it does things. Read gpwiki article.

Although this hand build website has served me well enough so far, I am still not pleased with it. Both it's looks and functionality. I have been working on a new site and have pre uploaded about 2 gigs of files for the new site but I have way to many projects on the go and am trying to get the project pages setup in the new site with tutorials, documentation, and getting the downloadable code in a half way decent state that it is just taking forever.

Yep as expected I have been playing World of Warcraft instead of working on my new website or doing any programming. :P

So I have not really written any code for the last month or so. I started a Death Knight toon and got him to level 80 and got into a guild that runs 25 man naxx four times a week. 

I have added a new xna 3.0 example project that demonstrates stenciling. You can download the example here. View Screenshot

I feel the shakes starting again. They never really left me. I try to put it out of my mind, but it is almost always there. An itch that yearns to be scratched. The anxiousness, the tension, the need to walk through the fields of Nagrand, to soar on a majestic Golden Gryphon, to curse at my pet whom I named "Retard".

Yes, if you have not already guessed or clicked on the above links I am referring to World of Warcraft. I have never felt such a deep sense of loss when I stopped playing that game. It's been six months give or take since I said my goodbyes. I guess living in a virtual world for six months straight will do that. I have never felt so drawn into a game world as much as I have in wow. With so much to see and do, I miss being there. Living it, loving it, hating it.

As I am writing this I can hear my brother playing wow in the next room. He has just recently renewed his account. He tells me he needs someone to play with, and to quest by his side. I can hear the clashing of swords, ogres grunting, steel blades impacting on shields.

But I hesitate, as much as I yearn to join him in glorious battle. To visit new places, and rejoin old friends, and guild mates. I know that if I renew my account, it will surely consume me. Countless hours will turn into days, then weeks, then months! I know I will only be be able to pull my self away just long enought to eat and sleep. My dreams will be full of ideas, places, and experiences that I will long to explore.

The new expantion pack Wrath of Lich King is drawing near. Should I or should I not renew my account. I find myself torn in two directions, between addiction and a sad emptyness.

Heaven help me! I have just clicked the complete purchase button ...

Having been programming computers for over two decades now I can't express enough just how frustrating it is to be playing a game for five hours and have it crash on me. Now the game crashing is not what pisses me off. The fact that the game does not have autosave functionality does.

The game I am talking about is Spore. My brother bought a copy and I decided to install it and give it a try. It is not really the type of game I am interested in but I thought I would check it out and see what the big deal was.

So here I was playing the game. I got to the space stage with a level 3 warp drive and was almost to the center of the galaxy when the game crashes. I threw my hands in the air and with a sense of dread and dispair realised that I may have just spent the last five hours building up my race for nothing. I carfully started up the game again and sure enough the game did not autosave my progress, and I sat there staring at the screen in utter disgust.

How in the fuck, in this day and age does a game like this, as vast and as big as a game like this, not have an autosave feature.  It is at that point I started shaking my head in the realization that I would no longer be playing Spore. Can you hear me EA? Any chance of me buying my own copy of this game just went from a possibility to no fucking chance in hell. It also reminds me of another game that does not have an autosave feature. Doom3. Right there in the game manual for doom 3 it states "Save and save often" WTF? Have these people never heard of autosave checkpoints before? Christ! even Super Mario World for the SNES has mid-level checkpoints!

I just don't know what else to say about it, other then it's just flabergasting to me that AAA titles like Spore don't have autosave functionality. So now that I have finished venting I am going to uninstall Spore and free up a few gigs of space on my harddrive.

And for those who are wondering, yes that is all it takes for me to dismiss a game as crap, no matter how much fun I may have had playing it up to that point. Maybe I just have a higher level of expectation, because of my programming background but if there is one thing I absolutely hate more than anything is having to go back and repeat myself. Heck I have Visual Studio setup to auto save every 60 seconds. Yeah that's how much I hate having to repeat my self.

I am running out of time before I go mushroom picking to try and upload my new website. And rather then trying to do a rush job of getting it up and running I am going to delay it and take my time to do it right. So that means I will have to try and get the new site up and running some time in November.

Just finished unpacking from my trip to Enderby, BC for a family reunion. My aunt and her husband purchased some property along the Shuswap River, about halfway between enderby and Mabel lake.

I pretty much got the asp.net gallery web control complete and will be organizing my 1000+  4.0 megapixel images so that when I switch over to the new site the gallery will be full of various imagery.