Vista Launch Party in Nashville

That’s right; in a show of complete geekiness, Le Chocolate Moose and I headed out to Cool Springs, TN for the Official Nashville Vista Launch.

I must say that Microsoft put a pretty good step forward for the “party,” and had the appropriate festiveness for the number of people there (maybe 100 non-MS or Circuit City employees).  There, unfortunately, wasn’t a whole lot to do.  More importantly, Circuit City didn’t have a whole lot of laptops.

You see, I haven’t been able to do hardly any coding the last few weeks because the only PC (we’ve been a Mac househould… that looks to be changing due to Vista) we have in the house is an old laptop that’s dying; I think there’s actual physical damage to one of the hard drive’s platters.  So I’ve been holding out to buy a Vista laptop.  Well, Circuit City
had abot 5 laptops with Vista for sale (ok, maybe 7).  So no new laptop for me yet; any suggestions?

So there wasn’t too much to do at the party, except free food (suprisingly good hamburgers and hot dogs), a pretty good DJ, and meeting some guy from the Titans (though I thought the older gentlemen who was “guarding” the Titans guy was much more amusing and charismatic).  The Titans guy was humorous in that he kept watching the highlight reel of himself instead of talking to people.  We got out picture with him; if I can get it scanned in I’ll post it here.

Oh, and I found out Microsoft has a small Nashville campus.  Who knew?

All in all, it was a decent event.   Microsoft put an appropriate amount of attention into the launch here.  I wish there were more community events like this, though.  So I hope to join the Vista Movement soon; Microsoft, here’s a guy WANTING to move away from Mac and towards your products.  Push your partners to get out some good laptops for me to buy!

Where Have I Been?

Working on a class to display a font… I’m pretty much done with it, my mother-in-law is coming in this weekend so I’m not sure if I’ll get to wrap it up and put a bow on it…

Any ideas where to host the zipped up file? Anyone know the legality of using fonts/are there any “open-source” fonts I can use?

XNA Screenshots

Shawn Hargreaves has an incredibly nifty and usefull bit of code to allow you to take screenshots of games running on the Xbox:

http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2007/01/08/capturing-screenshots-from-xbox-xna-games.aspx

When I read things like this I’m just amazed at what people are able to do with XNA and C#.   Programming is problem-solving skills + knowledge of what you can do with the language.  Both of those things come mostly from experience.  I love the fact that there are blogs are over the internet talking about programming and XNA so that I can just learn at the feet of these code masters…  One of these days I hope to meet these guys and just say thanks for all the wisdom they are unknowingly passing down.

Viva Pinata: A Programer’s Prospective

I think I can finally say I’m a programmer. A young, naive one; but a programmer. I finally completed a working program, the newsletter tracker. I’ll do a post-mortem on that some other time.

When I was doing video production full-time, I found myself not able to watch a movie or commercial without thinking about how the scene was cut, how the actors were lit, or how the camera panned away. When you begin to have just a little knowledge of how something might have been done, you begin to digest its products in a different way; when I play video games or use a program, I have begun to see them for their parts, not just their sum.

That said, I think there is one game that every aspiring developer should play while they are trying to learn prgramming:

Viva Pinata.

The game is PERFECT for the concepts of Object Oriented Programming. The game is, from my perspective, an abstract tutorial in programming concepts.

Almost every introduction to programming book I have read uses the something along these lines of understanding for oop:

You have an object; let’s call it an animal.
You have a dog. A dog is an animal, but an animal might not be a dog.
You have a duck; a duck is an animal, but not a dog.
You have four-legged animals. A fourlegged animal is abstract; it’s an animal, but not all animals are four-legged. Dogs are four-legged. Dogs bark. Bark dog, bark.

And so on. So with Viva Pinata, you have, really only a few basic “objects”:

Animal. Plant. Building. Land. Helper.

You have to treat each one different. But they all interface and interact. And certain animals interact with other animals. So, in my mind, it become so simple to view each animal as a class:

class public Snake()
{
int snakeNumber;
String snakeParent1;
String snakeParent2;

bool Romance1
bool Romance2

public void doRomance1() {
//player did something
Romance1 = true;
}
}

And so on. The game really puts a cute, 3D skin on object oriented prgramming in my mind. It really helped me piece together the “aha!” moments of how a game works. So what’s the point?

For all you XNA developers out there who are far beyond me, I have a request:

a Viva Pinata Starter Kit for XNA

I could only image the fun in creating my own animals to romace, setting what skills they need and so on. If anyone from Microsoft stumbles on to this blog… a Viva Pinata Starter Kit is a new revenue stream for you; I love being in the Creator’s Club and getting free stuff like the XNA Racer (once it comes out). Perhaps you could also offer licensed IP starter kits? Maybe they don’t include the right to create a game off the IP, but I’d pay just to fool around and look at the code of Viva Pinata, or a game like it.

So if you’re reading this, and you’re a programmer, you need to purchase Viva Pinata. Today. It is an incredibly fun game and hasn’t sold nearly was it deserves. Viva Pinata makes Object Oriented Progamming fun for the masses.