YotD Update

I’ve slowed down my posting quite a bit, and the reason is the game I’m working on is coming along a lot faster than I thought.

I had planned on posting a bunch of update videos, basically just capturing some of my unit tests and so on, partly because I thought they’d be interesting, partly because I thought they would generate interest in the project. I’m still not sure if I should do this or not. I want to, but since my own deadline is winter (a deadline I will probably beat by a good 6 months, at this rate), I’m thinking I should keep things under wraps.

A better reason (I think) to keep things quiet for now is that although I’m tearing through the game, it doesn’t look that great. I’m going to need to find myself an artist here at some point, because my noble efforts aren’t quite cutting it.

Camera Component Update

I’ve updated my XNA camera component quite a bit.

Initially, moves were handled by passing in a new position vector, a new lookat vector, and the time required for the camera to get there.  This was pretty horrible because it required a lot of calculations for very little payoff.  The biggest problem, though, was that certain moves were handled incorrectly.  For example, if I simply wanted the camera to turn around and look the other direction, the math wouldn’t necessarily turn in the direction I wanted.  So a simple 10 degree left turn might be processed as a 350 right turn.  Horrible.

What I have now is a much simpler system wherein moves are passed in as relative position translations, and relative xyz rotations.  Not only does this allow full control over the direction the camera turns, it also allows for a few other things, such as really simple absolute moves — there is only the intermediate step of subtracting the ultimate translation and rotation from the current translation and rotation in order to turn it into a relative move.  This also allows for zero error pause moves.  Just pass in two zero vectors.

Most importantly, though, the math is guaranteed to be correct, which means that the view and up vectors are rotated using the same matrix.  The result is an end to weird projection errors after a couple moves.

The video below demonstrates a couple moves:

XNA Gymnast

Walaber has released version 1.0 of Gymnast, a physics enabled gymnastics game built using XNA and the Farseer 2D physics library. Check out the trailer video below. Read more

An Introduction to HLSL (Part II)

Continuing on in our exploration of HLSL, let’s look at building a simple shader that applies a texture to a model using UV coordinates. Read more

An Introduction to HLSL (Part I)

In a previous article we looked at how to use custom shaders when rendering models, or as post-processing effects when applied to an entire scene. Now let’s look at how to build our own shaders. Read more

An XNA Camera Component

I’m currently working on a camera component for XNA.  Ideally I’d like it to be really complete, but I know that ultimately it’s just going to contain the functionality I need for YotD:BI.  At any rate, here’s a little description of what it will do, and a video of the camera in action. Read more