Ok, so the Steam Holiday Sale (http://www.steampowered.com) hit my free time pretty hard :)  I picked up a number of games, and have been enjoying Dragon Age, Borderlands and The Witcher quite a bit since the holidays.

 

That said, I haven't been completely idle on the XNA front.  I've got another mini tutorial almost ready to go, and I've been working on a brand spankin' new Tile Engine that supports square, hex, and isometric tile maps.  No real timeframe on that, as I still have the upcoming Mass Effect 2 to deal with :)

Better late than never!  :)

 

This has actually been hanging around on my hard drive for quite a while, but with upgrading my PC to Windows 7 and other various things that have cropped up over the last few months, I haven't had time to get it properly formatted and posted up as a tutorial.

 

But now here it is.  This is the second of my "mini tutorials", and covers a quick project I put together to experiment with both my Text Handling class, and doing things on the Zune.  Fair warning: There isn't much of a practical use to this project as is.  The tutorial takes you through building an app for the Zune (works on Windows as well... and no real reason it wouldn't work on the XBox) that lets you browse through text files on your Zune device.  Due to the restrictions associated with the Zune, however, the only way to get text files on the device is to include them as content objects in your project.

 

That said, there are some useful things covered here, including building a Visual Studio solution that contains a project for both Windows (for testing purposes) and a project for the Zune (for deployment purposes).  We do things like add a scroll bar to indicate how far along in the text we are, and save the location we were last at in a file so we can come back to it later using Storage Containers.

 

You can find the tutorial here.

 

On a side note, I've gotten a couple of e-mail questions about tile engines and the like.  I do have some newer material on this front, and hope to put some of it together in the near future.

I noted in my entry earlier today that a new tutorial was in the works, and I had some time this evening to do the formatting, so it is up faster than I had expected! :)

 

This code comes from a project I have been working on, for which I decided that I needed a simpler way to handle text output, and especially needed a way to change the font/color of text being output at arbitrary points in the string without using a bunch of different calls to SpriteBatch.Draw().  This tutorial walks through building a C# static class to automate some of the work in drawing text to the screen in XNA, and includes a couple of nifty features like rudimentary formatting codes, a "console"-type printing mode, word wrapping, and automatic font loading.

 

You can find the link on the Tutorials page, or jump there directly. 

 

This class should work on Windows, the XBox 360, and the Zune without changes, and is really just the basics of what this class could be expanded to do.

I finally decided to pick up a Zune, and grabbed the Zune 120, with 3.2in screen and 120gb hard drive.  I've been playing around with transfering some of my XNA projects to the Zune, and it's kinda fun to see my games running on the portable device.

 

Jason and I have been playing around with a few different projects, including a 3D conversion of Star Defense (which won't run on the Zune, as the Zune supports 2D graphics only) and a tile-based RPG engine that I've been playing with as a PC project.  I added a few lines to resize the display and compiled the project for the Zune and it works fine without further changes.

 

I've also been putting together a small new tutorial on building a class to make handling text with XNA a bit easier.  The class and tutorial write-up are finished, I just need to reformat the Word document to the format the site uses, so expect it to show up in the next few days.

Recently I decided that I really wanted to delve into 3D with XNA, so I started looking for reading material on the subject.  There are a number of good XNA books out there now, but I've had trouble following many of them when trying to work with 3D graphics because they jump right in and start talking about Quaternions and such before giving a good introduction to the concepts involved.  (Maybe I'm just dense, but the whole 3D math thing has always made my head hurt).

 

Not so with Learning XNA 3.0 by Aaron Reed.  The author teaches game programming using XNA, and the book itself is set up much like a class you would take to learn how to develop games using XNA.  There is a measured, built up approach to the concepts that I found very easy to follow while demystifying the arcana of 3D graphics programming.

 

The book starts out covering the basics of 2D rendering with SpriteBatch (ok, I'll admit I skipped those chapters) and then moves on to develop a 3D game throughout most of the chapters.  The game includes moving 3D models, a 3D camera, particle explosions, sound effects and music, and combining 3D with 2D overlays and text display.

 

Overall, I found the book to be a great introduction to 3D game programming.  So much so that I have started reworking a certain 2D game that appears as a 12 part tutorial on this site in to a 3D game, using 3D models for the objects and particles for the special effects.  If you are looking to get your feet wet with 3D graphics in XNA, Learning XNA 3.0 is a great place to start.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I'm still here... I've just been a bit busy the last couple of months and haven't had time to do much with XNA development for a while.

 

I have been spending small amounts of time revisiting a few games like Legend of Blacksilver and the Questron series on my Commodore 64.  These were some of my favorite games back in those days, and I would dearly love to develop an updated game along these lines.  Maybe something like this for the Zune if I can ever get around to getting one :)

 

Anyway, I hope to have some more content in the relatively near future.  Until then, keep coding!

I've uploaded a new five-part tutorial in which I expand the sprite engine we originally created in the Star Defense tutorial.  The new features include:

 

Examples are included, as is a download of the full project at the end of the series.  Enjoy!  And remember, comments and questions are always welcome.

 

Merry Christmas!  The weeks leading up to the hoiday have been a bit crazy, hence the lack of updates, however after the new year I hope to have some new goodies for you, including some items from my new 2D game project.

 

Happy Holidays!

- Kurt

I've run through all of the Star Defense tutorials and found that no changes were necessary for the upgrade to XNA 3.0.  I did update the ZIP file in Part 11 with the converted XNA 3 file for simplicity's sake.

 

Additionally, Part 12 is done!  In the final segment of the series, we add sound effects to our game events to wrap things up for the project.

 

I'm working on a summary/wrapup post for the Star Defense series that I will post in a few days.  I've also started working on a few other projects, one of which will likely end up as my next tutorial series.  No details yet, but it combines a rewrite of my old Tile Engine system with some advanced versions of the concepts developed in Star Defense.