Building an XNA Skybox with Blender

While you’ll find a lot of skydome tutorials on the net, sometimes you just want a simple skybox. Here’s how to build one in a few minutes in Blender. Read more

A Few New XNA Tutorials

A couple new XNA tutorials you might want to check out popped up on my radar recently.

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A Reusable XACT Component

This isn’t a how-to article, it’s more of a let’s discuss article. Sound and music often take a back seat when we’re developing a game, and maybe we want it to stay that way. How would you go about creating a reusable XACT wrapper class that would suit just about any purpose? Here’s how I did mine. Read more

XNA Tetris in 24 Hours

The “Tetris in 24 Hours” challenge is over, and the total dev time clocked in at just over 15 hours. This was about more than just coding up Tetris for the 360. It was also about figuring out some aspects of XNA I was unfamiliar with, as well as parsing someone else’s code (namely, the GameStateManagement example from creators.xna.com). Read more

PHP Scripting in Win32 Apps

This is a repost of something I put together a couple years ago, and as such it may be out of date. There are much better ways to add scripting support to your apps these days, but if you are dead-set on using PHP, this may help you do it.

In order to use the cli version of php for scripting in your win32 app, you’ll need to connect your app to PHP, send it PHP code, and read the processed output. Read more

Paper Tetris: Hours 6-10

I managed to squeeze 4 more hours in on the 24 hour Paper Tetris project. Added items were piece rotation, score keeping, board scanning (to detect complete rows), some adjustments to the background graph paper to accommodate the width and height of the blocks, and some basic collision detection — well, basically making sure a move is legal by checking it against the game arena for any block clashes.

It might look pretty much done, but there are still a few things to do:

1. In real Tetris, a move doesn’t end the instant your piece butts vertically against a fixed block. In this version, that’s exactly what happens. So a little delay needs to be added to allow you to slide pieces underneath gaps.
2. The game background was separated into two textures, a background image (the graph paper) and a HUD texture. I still need to make the HUD look cool and look a little more functional.
3. There’s a strange bug that might be mine, or it might be in the GameStateManagement sample. Basically, if you start a game, then end it, then start another game, we get a null pointer exception. Not sure why yet.
4. The block drop speed should increase as points increase.
5. Nothing happens when you lose yet!
6. Sound and music!
7. Some nifty effects? (if time permits)
8. Input handling is a little whack. You have to hit the arrow keys (or gamepad controller) every time in order to force a move or rotation. I’d like that to remain for the rotations, but I’d like to handle left/right/down properly if you hold down a key/direction.

None of that should take very long, which will hopefully leave enough time left over for some eye candy.

Paper Tetris: XNA Tetris in a Day

In my last post, I mentioned that I’d be doing a Tetris in a Day article soon.

Since I’ve got a lot of real world work to do, my “day” is going to be spread out over a couple days. I am keeping track of time put in though, since part of this article is going to focus on exactly how fast you could build a simple concept game like Tetris using XNA.

Here is the result of the first 5 hours:

As you can see, the concept is “Tetris on a Sheet of Paper”.  I’m kind of revealing my game geek here, but I used to draw out my favorite games in math class and do my best to “play” them when I was supposed to be paying attention.  I’ve always wanted to recreate that experience with a new game, and I’m using this Paper Tetris project to test the idea.

If you’re curious, the background graph paper is just a scan of a sheet of graph paper (with some adjustments to make sure things are evenly spaced).  I am also using the pretty awesome Art Rage 2 program for the game arena and the blocks, to get that “created on paper” look.

Stay tuned.  The first 5 hours saw most of the art completed, and the block & shape classes 70% complete.  All that’s left is to add a little game logic and some scoring, and of course input handling, and it’ll be ready to go.

Modeling for XNA with Blender Part IV

In the final part of the Blender/XNA series, we add two animations to our textured model, load it into the SkinnedSample using the new content processor, and switch between animation clips. Read more

Coming Up in March

As you know, the focus of Stromcode currently is on game development with XNA.

As of this post, I’ve covered a little bit of the basics: the model class, the GameStateManagement sample, and an overview of how to use shaders both on models, and as post-processing effects. I’ve also gone over how to use the open source Blender to build textured, animated models for XNA and use the new content processor in the SkinnedSample to render animations.

So here’s what’s coming up:

• Game in a Day: a full implementation of Tetris in under 24 hours
• Intro to HLSL
• Handling Input
• Audio with XACT

If you have any suggestions — things you want to know about, or things you want to know more about — let me know. Post a comment here and tell me what you’d like me to cover.

Modeling for XNA with Blender Part III

To this point, we’ve covered some basic modeling and texturing concepts. You should now know how to build a model and UV texture it. In part III, we’ll add a skeleton to a mesh in preparation for animation. Read more

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