I have just made public a new project that I have started called the Zider game engine. The Zider game engine will be a 2D/3D hybrid game engine focusing on 2D side scrolling, and top down game play styles.

Below lists the current status of the various features that are either currently working or on the drawing table.

Working features

1. Load/Save Maps in xml format
2. Edit map blocks with left and right mouse buttons
3. Can pan the map to expose other parts just by moving mouse near edges of screen or use WSAD keys on keyboard
4. Supports full screen and windowed modes
5. Basic, easy to use GUI system with anchoring support like in windows forms
6. Texture selection, and block selection so user can choose specific blocks to use for drawing with

Features on the drawing table

1. Layering. Currently Zider only supports one map layer.
2. Moving platforms (elevators, falling platforms)
3. Particle system using the Mercury Particle Engine
4. Ability to erase blocks
5. Characters, Actors, Items etc
6. Move over all sprite based drawing to full 3D geometry primitives.
7. Animation systems
8. Implement Farseer Physics Engine for physics, or develop custom phisics implementation. I may have come up with a superfast way of doing 2D Collision detection/response in the works.
9. Possibly an in game console. I already have one written but it's in VB.NET and MDX so it will have to be converted to C#.
10. Purchase a XNA creators club subscription and get code working on 360.
11. Keep all data files in xml format for easy of use and ease to editing. Notepad!

The Fart Sniffer tutorial will walk you through creating a number of flies that will fallow a scent trail, that you draw on the screen using the mouse. It will be designed to show how easy it is to code AI to achieve simple path finding / fallowing "fly like" behavior.

Thornhill mountian snow hike
Some pictures I took when I went for a hike up Thornhill mountian Jan 04, 2007.

To view more pictures check out the gallery page.

I added 2 more simple XNA example projects to the xna page.

• Top down character movement
  Some code that demonstrates top down character movement. View Screenshot
• Guns a blazin
  A small project that demonstrates top down character movement, with the ability to shoot 2 different weapons.. View Screenshot

I have added 4 more image galleries on the Gallery page.

• Dirt Textures
  Some pictures of various types of dirt.
• Textures
  Various texture pictures.
• Leaves
  Pictures of various types of leaves.
• Concrete
  Various pictures of different concrete, and bricks etc.

Dogs of the 2006 mushroom camp
Some pictures of the dogs we had up at this years (2006) mushroom camp. One of my aunts dogs the grey husky looking old lady is Sara the squirrel chaser!. Sara: 0, Squirrel 's: 1,034,879. Hey I didn't say she was good at it.  And my aunts other dog, and Sara's partner in crime Zena the rottweiler. And lets not forget little Murphy harper, or just plain murphy. There are also a few pics of my other aunts dog Shep, the border collie. And lastly the dog who needs no introduction, dufus Duke the wonder dog! That would be the black lab. I call him dufus Duke the wonder dog, well,... because he makes you wonder sometimes.

Mushroom Camp 2006 Construction
Contains a image gallery of my 2006 mushroom camp construction.

It's Batty!
There was a small bat that kept comming back almost every day for the last week or so while I was at mushroom camp this year (2006). Twice it let me pick him up wrap him up in my summer shorts and put it inside my wood stove heated camp!
I even got video of me petting him!