DirectX

If you are reading this...

Nick — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Then you are missing out on content on my new blog!

The new blog url is:

http://sharepointnick.com/blog/default.aspx

And the new RSS feed you need to subscribe to is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointnick

See you on the other side!

SharePointNick.com

Nick — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:55:00 GMT

www.sharepointnick.com

This will be the new site very soon!

Make sure you are using the feedburner RSS feed and the move will be painless for you! Here it is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vb-techWeblog

There's some 600 people that aren't using this so you better all update it now!

XNA Xbox 360 bits and pieces

Nick — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:42:00 GMT

I posted something about XNA a little while ago but never managed to find time to download the beta of XNA Game Studio Express. But Microsoft released version 1.0 just before Xmas and with a few video's up on Channel 9 I've had sometime this past few days to watch them and get everything downloaded and setup.

First thing you've got to do if you're even slightly interested in gaming is watch the Channel 9 Videos here.

http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/XNA

The best one I think is Looking at XNA - part 2, but they should all definitely be watched. How cool is it watching as they put a breakpoint in Visual Studio and it breaks when the game running on the 360 hits it!

So once you've watched all the vids get the stuff downloaded. You can find full instructions here on how to link your 360 and XNA Game Studio Express:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb197292.aspx

I bought a 12 months subscription to the XNA creators club as it's a good saving over the 4 month option. XNA Game Studio comes with the Spacewar game which you can create, edit, and deploy to your 360. No joke but I had this working in about 15 mins and that included running up and down the stairs to my 360 a few times! I can see I'm going to either have to move it up to the office, or buy another 360 and TV for up here! :-)

So I've only spent a little while on this today and I'm trying to keep cool about how great it really is. From watching the Channel 9 videos you'll see that full 3d games are possible, and the comment that games of a higher graphics standard than 1st generation Xbox games are possible with XNA is pretty damm amazing!

So now I'm going to start going through the various sites and tutorials out there. I kept buying Game development books with C++ throughout university but never really got past the basics so I'm going to start this from afresh as well. I think I'll post tutorials on the blog as well as I find writing what I learn always motivates me to learn it properly, and to keep going! :-) So I've invented a new XNA category tag for the blog in case anyone wants to subscribe to just those posts.

One funny thing that's kind of related, I was searching around on Amazon.com for any XNA related books and came across Game Engine Toolset Development. Reading the authors biography it's pretty cool and scary that he used to be a SharePoint guy! Perhaps there's hope for me yet getting a career in the Games Industry! :-)

So the next steps as I mentioned are going through the tutorials. I've also hooked up with a friend I play on Xbox Live with who's interested in working on a game and has a very creative mind :-) so I'm hoping for good ideas to come from him! If anybody else is interested in doing anything let me know. I think the thing that .NET developers are going to struggle with and what we'll find hard is the 3d modeling and art work, so if you are any good at 3d models let me know! Also any links to good XNA resources please leave them in the comments section.

Laptop stolen

Nick — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:15:00 GMT

unfortunately I had my laptop stolen tonight.

If anybody see's any dodgy posts i apologies.

XNA : Business developers making 360 games in c#?!?!

Nick — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:16:00 GMT

As a 360 player, c# developer, and wanna be games developer (well perhaps during my teen years!) the XNA stuff that Microsoft are talking about is really interesting. There’s a great video on Channel 9 about it now that made me want to blog about it for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s the first video I’ve watched with Rory Blyth interviewing instead of Robert Scoble, and secondly obviously it’s about XNA!

To cover the first part, it’s interesting Rory has taken a different interview approach of being in shot instead of behind the camera like Scoble. It works for sure, but it’s a little weird that the camera is setup exactly where the person who is being interviewed would ‘look into the distance’ when the are talking. This gives the impression they are talking to the camera, although all they want to do is not maintain eye contact for the whole time of the interview. Apart from that though it works really well!!! I have no interview experience by the way so I could be talking crap on this one…!

The second exciting bit which is based on the actual topic of the interview is way exicing. I bought Gears of War and Call of Duty 3 at the weekend, and Sophie commented that the only games out there seem to be about war, driving, or football (soccer) and I guess she’s right. When growing up and playing games on my Spectrum 48k and early PC games such as Doom I always wanted to be a games developer. Soon after finishing uni though I realised it was pretty damm hard stuff and also didn’t pay too well as so many people wanted to do it!! So I ended up going into business type software development and to be honest I’ve not thought about writing games too much apart from the odd tinker with Managed DirectX. The talk of XNA stirs the emotions again though. Perhaps I could write a cool game all by myself! Hmmmm still doubtful as my basic skills with PaintBrush won’t really translate over to 3d Studio Max, but hopefully a lot of other keen people will be able to take their original and inventive ideas and turn them into either free/cheap downloads, or at least proof of concepts that will show that games about things other than war, driving and football might work!

I’m far too busy with SharePoint these days to seriously look at XNA but I’ll keep an eye on it and perhaps have a go at trying to create the HelloWorld app that will eventually run on a 360.

So how many people developing business apps during the day are interested in XNA? What actually goes into making a game? Firstly it’s a great idea, other than that it’s graphics, workflow and communication. Although XNA seems to be .NET 2.0 based who’s to say that it won’t soon support Windows Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation for the logic and networking (I think WPF would be too rich for games!). Now all everybody needs is that one good idea…

Windows Presentation Foundation

Nick — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 22:35:00 GMT

Speaking to a few Microsoft people at the geek dinner on Saturday they were very impressed that we are using Windows Presentation Foundation, especially as all the XAML is being hand coded! Tim’s put together a brief case study of the legislative document application we are using WPF for. Take a look at it here:

http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/casestudies/compliance

There’s a short video as well of all the documents modeled in 3d space. Clicking on a document node and you can see all regulations that apply to that documents…… well there’s plenty on that webpage to describe what it is. We’ll be updating the movie and case study as we have more, and I’ll post updates on here too when we have new stuff to show.

Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) Demo and DotNet CMS

Nick — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 06:52:00 GMT

Tim and Kazi are working hard to put together a short demo of the work they've been doing with Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon). I've got to say it's very cool. One thing to note though is that it runs a little slow on Kazis laptop which goes to show a lot of people may be requiring new graphics cards to make the most of Windows Vista and WPF applications. Of course I'm sure WPF will be optimized before RTM release but it's something that's been commented on before on other blogs.

I'm busy working on SSIS still and spending any spare time working on the DotNet CMS. It's an ASP.NET 2.0 Content Management system with blogging built in. We are considering either packaging the application up and selling it as a hosted service, or could release the source code to the masses. I'm currently building this based on how I think a basic CMS should work, but I'd be interested to hear others ideas, or annoyances with your current CMS.

developer inspiration

Nick — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 12:19:00 GMT

Looking for some inspiration for your next ‘pet project’? Get over to Channel 9 and take a look at the ShowOff section. Developers were asked to submit their projects for show at the PDC. There’s some pretty wicked stuff there and I’ve only watched a couple so far!

I particuarly love cfWorldWind. I didn’t realise that Mobile 5.0 was going to have Managed Direct3D Mobile in it. Time for some cracking games for Pocket PC’s. Who needs a PSP? Anybody fancy working on a port of Doom2 for Pocket PC?

www.thezbuffer.com

Nick — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 18:21:00 GMT

New managed DirectX website found from various blogs:

Http://www.thezbuffer.com

Lets hope they manage to do a better job than I did with www.c-sharp.co.uk. Speaking of which I have been reading Beginning Game Programming with c sharp. I hope to get coding the examples soon, but as always, paying work must come first. The book is very good. I feel more confident reading it for some reason. This could be either because my .Net has improve dramatically, or that the revision of the vb.net book really has improved it.

Beginning .Net Game Programming in C#

Nick — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 08:48:00 GMT

Ordered a book from Amazon the other day and it's just been dispatched:
Beginning .Net Game Programming in C#

A bargin price of just under £20.00! I've found a friend who is also interested in doing so games programming in C# and he's also ordered the book so hopefully we should have some fun working through it together. I spotted the book as I read one of the authors weblogs, David Weller. While ordering I also noticed that Tom Millers great book Managed DirectX 9 has been reduced to £12.75! An absolute bargain. I'd order both of those books now if you have any interest in C# and game programming.