Posts

I am going to start with a little rant about Visual Studio default Installer, you know, the one you can make for yout XNA games inside VS. Ugly and not very handy, sure it installs every dependency but doesn’t leave many options like….hum…I don’t know choosing the location where you want to install? Moving along…I discovered this little cool installer called InnoSetup, and best of all it’s free. InnoSetup has different ways of you building a proper installer but I am going to cover the script way, much more control. ...

Ok, I know I’ve been making far too much posts about Vizati but this time it’s for a good reason, anyone interested in trying out the game can do it…right about NOW… http://www.differentpixel.com/2010/06/vizati-demo-available/ Also on a quick update, yesterday I had the chance to test Vizati at Windows Phone 7 Developer’s Hub on a real WP7 device, which was awesome. I want to thank João Antão, Nuno Costa, Ben Riga and Neil Hutson for the opportunity. ...

How many times has it happened where you have this one class, let’s say it’s a spaceship that was destroyed. Now you have tell all other dependent objects that she died, any independent sprite animation class, AI, etc etc because they were relying on her. Another thing is, in my case, having a scene that contains all the objects and by deleting the ship It won’t get removed from the scene, keeping the reference alive and so Garbage collector won’t kick in. Deleting and removing from the list is a way, but why should you inside the spaceship class have know how to remove from the Scene list? Makes no sense. The list should know how to treat a deleted object. ...

No, I’m not dead….yet… It’s just that I’ve been stuck on Different Pixel development dungeon for the past weeks finishing and polishing (bug hunting) my first game, Vizati. Most of you have been following the process and asking things every since we showed the beta version at XNA Pizza Night, after which we decided to finish the game and try to sell it to see how it goes. Three months later and here I am, making the final touches on the game before it’s release on 11th June. The game will be available thought GamersGate (maybe others, I’ll update in the future). ...

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been utterly busy so I haven’t had the time for any tutorials. This week I got an invitation from João Antão to showcase Vizati as part of his XNA Framework presentation. This occurred during the Imagine Cup final on Portugal. I’ve been playing with the WP7 tools and I decided to try and port Vizati to XNA 4.0 and give it a try on the emulator so I could show all 3 versions running simultaneous. The result was pretty good i think. It’s virtually identical. ...

I’ve seen this quite a bit around on XNA forums and got 2 emails last week asking about this: I want to make a 3000×3000 grass background by tiling this small grass image I have. Should I make one big image or should I make a for cycle drawing the image (3000/TileSize) times? My answer is neither of them. The big image has a huge impact on every Draw and more, you are limiting your map to the max Texture Size the graphic card can handle. ...

Yesterday was an exciting one for all sorts of developers around the world. Visual Studio 2010 got available for both MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers. First time I installed VS2010 was in the RC form mainly because of WP7 Developer’s Tools and XNA4.0 but haven’t made many investment in searching for new features. But being available at Dreamspark I downloaded the Professional version and decided to try it out a bit. On a side note to WP7 developers, if you are using VS RC to develop application to the phone don’t install the RTM version of VS2010 since it’s not compatible with WP7 developer tools yet. You have to stick with the RC for now. ...

Note: 22/04/2013 – Due to popular request I made an article about achieving this effect in OpenGL Independent Resolution Rendering?? What’s this all about? Basically a way of not caring what you resolution is. Ever had Gui elements misplaced because you changed the resolution? Or getting out of the screen? If you are doing a game on Xna just for Xbox360 you can basically use a 1280×720 base resolution and the Xbox will scale the game for you making the proper Letterbox. ...

Microsoft FxCop, know what this is all about? Good for you, keep using it, It’s a valuable tool. For those who don’t know you can download it here and read the MSDN documentation here. FxCop is a is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. I decided to make a profile of my current working project and it reported tons of stuff. ...

So I was watching Microsoft Mix10 and while talking about the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. What? But like now now? I went to http://developer.windowsphone.com/ and XNA Creator’s Club and there it was. The packages contains: A CTP of the new Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Tools and framework to develop Windows Phone applications and games with Silverlight A CTP of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that allows you to develop Windows Phone games with the XNA Framework A Windows Phone 7 Series emulator that can be used to deploy and debug Windows Phone applications and games Add-on to allow you to use the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate to develop Windows Phone applications and games if you have it installed Pretty good right? For those who have been living under a rock the XNA 4.0 brings another development platform, Windows Phone 7 series, which leaves us with XBOX360, PC and the new mobile. ...