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Website may be up and down over next few months. I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of everything.
Going back to simple individual .htm pages, new overall site theme, sanitizing and cleaning up html of all
pages and blog posts, attempting to implement a new tooling and publishing system etc etc.
I
have posted a RPG objects example application on the projects page. The
example code was written so that I could use it as a thinking tool. It
implements a very basic RPG item system. Click here to get more info.
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I just finished adding a projects page to the site. You can find it here as well as the xImageSV image browsing application.
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I have not abandoned this site I'm still here and still playing wow, as a lvl 54 hunter named landasoar. I have also, believe it or not, started to write a little bit of code again. This time I have written some mmo
related code for handling items and character knowledge (aka skills).
It's just some code I wanted to write to get the feel for how
complicated or simple it would be to write an item and character
knowledge system. Turns out it rather easy and simple. That was until I
broke the code earlier today trying to move it over from vs2008 to
vs2005 and xna as well as add a few more features.
I will try
to finish the port and get a simple working demo uploaded to this site
... whenever I can stop playing wow for a few hours.
Also, I
still keep forgetting to upload the remaining 2 gigs or so of 4mp
pictures I have taken these last two years. You can see what I have
uploaded so far on the gallery page.
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... how I hate web development. Everything always works perfectly fine on
my local machine but as soon as I upload it to the server, Poof! It all
goes to shit. Oh I'm so glad that I am getting near the end of this
fiasco. As you can see the new site is up and running. Kind of. There
are still issues with performance and it has not been fully tested yet
but it is pretty much feature complete.
I am using the blog publishing system I implemented using MSDN My.Blogs code to make this post.
So hopefully when I click the post button, it will work this time and not give me another bs security error.
Here goes nothing ... Click
( EDIT: Grrrrr another frikin' error! IE: this post was made by editing the feed file directly! )
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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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I just uploaded a new XNA content importer/processor library to the XNA page
called StreamContentProcessor. The StreamContentProcessor allows you to
use simple stream based importer and/or processors, so you can read
your content files as a stream using content.Load("AssetName");
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