Hot Air Race goes to the moon

Posted on March 20, 2009

We are starting to work again on the Hot Air Race project, and we decided to move the playground... on the Moon (which calls for a new name... Rocket Race?)!

As always, coding proceeds veeery slowly, as there are only two people working on the project in their spare time. Moving on the Moon will hopefully simplify the graphics and make the whole thing feel a lot better; we currently are in the process of re-designing all the textures. I'll post a screenshot as soon as I have one, which may be tomorrow... or in a year's time :)

P.S. I updated the downloadable GUIManager30.zip including the "bin" directory with all the DLL needed to run the example.

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...and it works!

Posted on November 05, 2008

This is going to make debugging a LOT easier: I was able to run my XNA game on a Virtual Machine running XP, so I can now debug my network routines all by myself and with my laptop only! This is going to speed things up a lot.

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Hot Air Race goes LIVE!

Posted on November 04, 2008

With less effort than I thought, the main networking routines are now up and running! Players can host or join a SystemLink (LAN) session and play the game from the beginning to the end. However, I discovered that every Windows machine must have a full XNA Games Studio 3.0 installation (which requires VS 2008 or VC# Express 2008) in order to have the networking components fully working.

Now I'll have to spend some time on the audio part, as the game is totally silent at the moment. Also the controls need some tweaking. I hope we'll be buying a Premium Creators subscription soon, so that we will be able to submit the game to peer review (brrr)

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Hot Air Race is growing

Posted on October 27, 2008

Our latest creation, Hot Air Race, is growing. The core game mechanics are into place and I'm currently working on fulfilling the creator's best practices. After that, I'll face the networking part.

Hot Air Race is a turn-based multiplayer game depicting a race between hot air baloons: you can see an early startup screen in a previous post. We hope to be able to put it on Xbox Live Community Games soon.

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GuiManager30 v1.1 available

Posted on September 10, 2008

This new release includes text boxes and option boxes; check out the example in the "Projects" section on your left.

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What GuiManager can do

Posted on August 27, 2008

Here's a screenshot: everything you see is managed by the GuiManager and saved to an XML config file. All the writings can be clicked, and change their color when the mouse cursor passes over them.

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GuiManager is back

Posted on August 27, 2008

Maybe I'm wrong, but there still seems to be a lack of a killer 2D GUI solution in the XNA community, so here's my proposal. You can download a sample project by clicking on the GuiManager link in the Projects section on your left. XNA Framework 3.0 required.

To use the GuiManager, you first need to reference GUIManager30.dll in your project; you'll also need to add a reference to XMLPipeline30.dll to the references for the Content Pipeline (this is a custom extension to the content pipeline which the GUIManager uses to read its XML config files -- it basically reads and writes encrypted XMLs to disk, so that no one can modify your GUI configuration by editing config files).

After doing that, you'll need to define which elements you want in your GUI by compiling an XML file; you'll find all currently available elements in the Sample. Please note the in this early release the the XML tags inside each GUI element (e.g. inside a section) must be written in the same exact order in which they appear in the sample. This will be soon fixed by looking for tags by name and not by order.

You can also add elements programatically, if you want to. Some things (like event handlers) must be added programatically (the Sample shows how).

You also need to add gui_default_elems.png and gui_default_elems_desc.xml to your project, as they contain the definitions and the textures for GUI elements (like checkboxes). Be sure to edit gui_default_elems_desc.xml so that it points to the correct path of gui_default_elems.png in your project.

TIP: You can easily create a button by adding an event handler for mouse clicks to a TextureQuad or to an AnimatedTextureQuad.

Currently available events are:

public delegate void OnMouseClickMethod(GUIComponent sender);
public delegate void OnMouseOverMethod(GUIComponent sender);
public delegate void OnMouseInMethod(GUIComponent sender);
public delegate void OnMouseOutMethod(GUIComponent sender);
public delegate void OnUpdateMethod(GUIComponent sender);

public enum AnimationType
{
NoAnimation = 0,
SingleLeftToRight = 1,
SingleRightToLeft = 2,
RollingContinuous = 3,
AlternatingContinuous = 4,
}

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Back soon

Posted on August 21, 2008

A lot of time has passed, and XNA jumped to version 3.0 (CTP) while I was busy with other things. Carz was my first serious experiment, but I consider it a discontinued project. I'm working on saving what's left of the GUIManager and GUIEditor (which are still quite unique tools, suprisingly) so I'm trying to update them to the 3.0 version of the framework. I'll post here my progress, hoping to have the time to get something done for real.

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Carz updated

Posted on November 30, 2007

I uploaded a slightly modified version of Carz (I included a DLL which I discovered not being redistributed with the XNA redist, althought it is necessary for custom Content Pipeline Importers and Processors to work). I'm now working at a 2D Tile Engine game, I'll post something as soon as possibile. In the meantime I discovered that these guys made a "GuiManager" which is incredibily similar to mine! I guess that my idea was good, indeed :)

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Carz

Posted on May 25, 2007

Carz v0.1.0.2 is now available for download. Currently it only offers a model moving around in a very basic environment. The model is the tank model from the Creators web site. You can turn the turret around with the mouse, fire with the left mouse button and move the model with the A, S, D and W keys. The P key brings up the pause screen which lets you configure some graphical options. The F key toggles the fullscreen mode.

The download is about 95 MB.

You will need the XNA Redist for the game to run, I also suggest to download the XNA Requirements Checker and check if you meet the requirements to run XNA games. Everything is in the boxes at your left.

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