XNA Refresh Go!

Huzzah! The XNA update has gone live!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937795.aspx

This includes the font update that I’ve been waiting for (as well as a packager for sharing the projects)… looks like it’s back to programming for me! Woohoo (that’s a “woohoo” of genuine excitemet)!

UPDATE:

more complete details here 

The Marriage

now this is games as art; this game is needs to be played.  download it, then read the instructions after you’ve played a few times.

ShadowRun Beta NDA Lifted

 So… I’ve been slacking on the programming.  Why?  Because all my free time’s gone into playing a wee little game called ShadowRun.  I used to play a bit of the pen & paper game, so I was a bit nervous about the transition to it being an FPS…

 But, simply put, the game rocks.

 I mean, it rocks.  It’s really, really good.

I can’t wait for the game to come out so my friends and I all can buy it and play together.  This is the game I wanted PDZ to be; this is game GoW should have been; this is, quite simply, the best online experience I’ve had so far.

 I guess I should talk a bit about why it’s so good.  The game is played in CounterStrike fashion, where you get cash at the beginning of each round to purchase weapons and tech to give you an edge.  Of course, the winners get more cash, etc.  The key to the game isn’t just a balanced player, but a balanced team.  For each weapon, tech, or magic ability there is a corresponding weapon, tech, or magic ability to counter it.  The game is very balanced.

 Most importantly, the game is a blast to play.  It pays to experiment with the different classes and enhancements to find your niche.  I don’t know that I’ve foudn mine yet… but an elf (natural healing) with a katana (close combat, third-person view) supported by a minion (the giant blue thing in the picture) seems to work for me.  Well… I typically die most rounds, but I have a blast doing it.

 So yes, Microsoft has a certifiable hit on their hands.  ShadowRun = FPS goodness.

Microsoft’s Programming Community

Say what you will about the big MS, but they support developers not only with great content and tutorials, but with stylish and inviting tools.  In the past few days Microsoft has shown strong support for us budding developers with two sites full of content from which to build upon:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/learningpath/ 

http://creators.xna.com/

And prizes and contests for the more experienced:

http://dreambuildplay.com/

 I want to learn JAVA, really I do.  I know I’d have a future at my current workplace as a JAVA developer if I would just buckle down and commit to it.  Curse you Microsoft for being so good at getting the right tools out there to snag us young, learning developers.  You wouldn’t need an employee with an MBA and a touch programming experience, would you Microsoft?

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.

XNA: For Beginners or No?

Dennis, the senior software engineer for Cecropia, makes any interesting analysis of the XNA tools on his blog.

My young programmer mind boils down his post to two things:

1)  He doesn’t like that XNA is a propritary API

2)  He doesn’t like that you have to pay to run the applications on a 360

I understand the concerns about XNA being proprietary.  Me learning XNA is not going to help me learn a whole lot about C++ in order to later code for Nintendo’s systems.  However, me learning XNA is, in fact, helping me learn C# and, to an extent, JAVA.  Giving a geek the opportunity to code for a gaming system, no matter which one, is motivation enough to learn.

It works! XNA on the 360

Aaron on the XBOX 360

Originally uploaded by aaronlinne.

That’s right.

XNA was launched today (msdn.com/xna). I haven’t touched the XNA tools since September, before the second beta went out. I saw all the problems people were having with the transition from alpha to beta, so I didn’t want to get stuck.

Well let me say that XNA rocks.

In about 2 hours I was able to write the neccessary code to place my head on the screen, move it around and, of course, make its mouth open and close. It’s all the first steps of my first real game.

Amidst all the questions of work, career and studies, it was a simply awesome experience to site down for a couple of hours and see something through. And as cool as writing programs on a PC is, there is a huge amount of joy in writing something to run on a video game system.

When I was a young child, my dad tried to learn BASIC in order to make a game for the IntelliVision. He told me once that he was going to make a game for me and my sister. Unfortunately, he never quite got around to it.

But here I am, 20-some years later, and I have the beginning workings of a game. I can wait to see what comes out of XNA not just from myself, but from the whole XNA Community.

Been a Long Time…

Mmm… Wii

Originally uploaded by aaronlinne.

So, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a gumption to blog. Why is this? Because it seems I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Recently, I was presented with a couple of different oppertunities at my job… all in different fields I went for them all… and, well, none have panned out just yet. Do what disiciplines did I try my hand at?

1) Marketing & Metrics
2) Programming
3) Motion Media/User Interface (making DVD menus, Flash interactive menus)

And, of course, I’m currently working in the area of Customer Service. So, one might ask… how does that any of that relate?

For me… they all make perfect sense and go hand in hand together, each a part of me and the things I can do. And, they’re all skills I have, and want to continue to develop in myself. So what kind of job am I setting myself up for? What direction am I going in?

At this point, I’d have to say it’s the area of interactive media. Or, as the hipsters call it, “video games”.

To me, it’s not just a chance to make a buck or pretty graphics. It’s about telling a story. It’s about having new experiences. It’s about little victories and it’s about community. It’s about taking someone to another world, and letting them live there for a while. And once they’re in that world? Then maybe everything’s ok for a little while. And maybe, just maybe, life can be good.

So, amidst being in the throws of once of the best story-telling games ever, Zelda: Twilight Princess, I find myself inching back toward XNA & C#, away from JAVA. I hate that I keep bouncing back and forth between languages… but I’m trying to find what I want to do, what language makes sense to me.

Curse you Microsoft for making the Visual Studio products SO amazingly good. Curse you for making available so many programmer tools and great tuitorials. I’m trying hard to learn JAVA, but you and your C# ways just keep pulling me back.

So here’s to going back to C#, back to tuitorials, and back to the Wii and Twilight Princess.

Sigh – I need more time in life.

Aaron’s Head is now Animated

I’m learning that programming as a novice is a whole lot of trial and error, with an akward learning curve.

Today I managed to get my moving sprite animated; if it’s moving right it looks right. If it’s moving left, it looks left. I also got it open and close the mouth from a space bar press! The path to getting there however, was a long one…

Aaron’s Head is now Movable!

So…. it took my lunchtime at work. And then maybe an hour at the house tonight looking at tutorials and code and so on. But I got it to work; now, you too can control moving my head:

www.sonartstreet.com/apps/xna/movinghead.zip

Unfortunately, I do have to lodge my first complaint with the XNA tools so far. The deployment leaves a bit to be desired still. In order to install and play my “game” you have to install the .net framework. Not a huge deal… but inconvienent. Also, on my wish list for the final product, let us export a zip file with everything set up; that’s how we’re going to be distributing the apps anyways.

So, here’s the code I wrote to move my head around (I don’t know how to make this look like real code in WordPress… I do use identations, really):