Website may be up and down over next few months. I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of everything. Going back to simple individual .htm pages, new overall site theme, sanitizing and cleaning up html of all pages and blog posts, attempting to implement a new tooling and publishing system etc etc.

Big Post

Published 7/8/2008 by createdbyx in News

OK this has got to be the last time I do this! I have ported over my website content to the new site and have added a few new pieces of content. I know I have said this before but I have got to stop doing this.

XNA

Projects

  • Added xDocs to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
  • Added xGallery to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
  • Added xImageLink to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
  • Added ADVBlogger to the projects page - Blogengine.net extention
  • Added Simbegal to the projects page - Blogengine.net/asp.net usercontrol
  • Added xPagePathNav to the projects page - Blogengine.net extention

Other Updates Include

  • Added XML comments through out many of the Zider related projects
  • Most if the projects I have now have documentation pages associated with them. The documentation pages are auto generated using xDocs
  • My previously owned ScamInformation.com domain is now going for $14,500 :(
  • Added ALL my pictures to the gallery page. But it could be organized better :P There are over 3000 pictures!

As well as various other additions and changes.  To many to remember them all. :P

 Firefox constanly crashing!!!  Geeze I upgraded to firefox 3.0 and it seems to crash constantly! It's like russian roulette web surfing you never know when it's going to crash. I must have submitted like 50 error reports so far.


Shwing!

Published 2/23/2008 by createdbyx in News | Programming | XNA
The xna team just announced on Feb 20, 2008 that they will be finally making it possible to publish your home brew games on xbox live.

But wait that's not all. They are also bringing the xna platform to the ZUNE!!!  Un-freaking believable!!! Two thumbs up! WAY UP!

If you have been fallowing my blog and read my last post it stated that I would have Release 2 of my xGameConsoleXNA library up and posted within a week. Well a week has come and gone. 2 weeks, ... 3 Weeks, 4 Weeks, ... What can I say. When a person sleeps when there tired and not when social doctrine declares when it is time, the days seem to blend into one another and time passes. 4 whole weeks. Hmm, seems like only yesterday that I made my last post.

Anyway it has been a busy few weeks. The house has been sold and we need to be out by mid July, so we have been packing and getting ready to move. And I am destined to be home less for the next few months until the mushroom season starts up again in late august. Which means my computer use and internet connection will be severely limited for some time.

I have also started working on a new project with my brother these last two weeks. I don't want to say too much about it because it's not finished but suffice it to say I have written some apps that have crawled over 1.2 million page links in just a few days, and out of those 625000+ are blog related. We are thinking about creating a service and doing a search engine designed for a select group of people, that will offer much more detailed info that a standard Google search can. My brother seems to think we could make up to $20,000 a month each if we can get it working and it really starts to take off. It would also be the first project I have worked on whose end result is intended to put some money in my pocket. For someone who can live comfortably on less then $4800 a year, $20,000 a month seems like millions. But until that happens it is a wait and see game.

And lest you think I have forgotten about the xGameConsoleXNA library, check out the xGameConsoleXNA page for the link to the Release 2 download as well as some how to articles. Better late then never!

I have gone back and finally done some more work on my xGameConsoleXNA library for the XNA platform. The next release will be Release 2 and will mainly contain updates to how the user interacts with the console.

  1. It can now do things like scroll through the text that was written out to the console
  2. Pressing the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard you can set the insertion point for typing text
  3. If you type a really long line of text in the entry line that is too long to fit within the console the text will now gracefully scroll left or right depending on where the insertion point is
  4. More comments in the code as well as xml 'summery' comments for the methods
  5. Made a number of optomizations so some parts of the code are more simplified
  6. There are some breaking changes such as some properties have been renamed to better more understandable names. I also moved a few methods and properties out of the console class and into the ConsoleComponent class because they really were more suited being in the ConsoleComponent class.
  7. I also added a WordWrap property to the ConsoleComponent class so that text that gets written to the console will now wrap to the next line if it does not fit.
I should hopefully upload Release 2 within the next week. I would also like to mention that I noticed some of the xGameConsoleXNA code may not be 360 compatible, even though I cannot test it on the 360 because I do not have a creators club subscription. For example the LoadAlias command was using the IO.File.ReadAllLines method and the 360 xna api's do not contain the ReadAllLines method. I will try to keep an eye out for more code like that. I modified the code so that it no longer uses the ReadAllLines method but I will not be able to ensure that xGameConsoleXNA will seamlessly run on the 360 until I get a creators club subscription.

It is my intention to eventually get the xGameConsoleXNA working on the 360 but I promised myself that I would only purchase a creators club subscription after I had completed or had come close to completed a working game. So yeah, being more of a tool developer it might take me a while to get a subscription. :(

The first release of the xMessages component was really just a introduction to what I was working on. I have yet to see any other components out there that does what the xMessages component does. Anyway I updated the code (Release 2) so that it now supports a interface driven modal so that text effects and image effects can be created and applied to the message. I am still no where close to being done. There are still some minor bugs here and there, and I put a little more comments in my code. Future releases will continue to improve the code as well as provide better documentation.

Eventually I hope to write some content pipeline processors so that an entire conversation can be created and stored in a xml file and then use the content.Load method to load that whole conversations in one line of code rather then having to write many lines of code by hand to get it to do stuff. i am also thinking of writing a tool for authoring conversations and saving them out to xml files so that you do not have to write the xml files by hand. But that will not be for some time.

If you watch the updated video you can start to see what the end goal for the xMessage component is trying to achieve.

I have posted a video of the xMessage component in action to give people a sense of what it can do. You can find the video here.

I have added a new XNA based project to the XNA page called xMessage. The xMessages component is designed for in game chararacter dialog to be displayed similar to games like Final Fantasy for the NES. This component makes use of xFripperyXNA and StreamContentProcessor. Both are included in the download.

Being the first release ther are some minor issues that still need to be worked out, such as when the component is typing out text if the word being drawn will not fit within the rectangle, the partly drawn word will dissapear from the end of the line and reappear at the begining of the next line.

Other then that the component allows an image to be displayed with the text, and the text is also dynamically changes acording to the size of the dialog. When running the demo use the left mouse button to move the dialog and the right mouse button to resize the dialog.

Future editions will have support for animated images so your game could have a picture of a talking head for example. As well as better text drawing support, and the ability to display the image on the right hand side. Also planning on adding more text drawing animations.


I just uploaded a new XNA content importer/processor library to the XNA page called StreamContentProcessor. The StreamContentProcessor allows you to use simple stream based importer and/or processors, so you can read your content files as a stream using content.Load("AssetName");

I have just uploaded the third release of my still in progress Zider game engine for XNA. You can find the download on the Zider page.

Features or changes for R3
  • Updated the xGameConsoleXNA library so commands now have an array of string arguments and a new "usedAsFunction" boolean parameter. usedAsFunction when set to true means that the command is being used as a function and allows the command logic to be aware of that.
  • Added Actor support
  • Added a SceneManager to the
  • Added an abstracted "UserInputService" service (Work in progress)
  • Full 360 controller support added. So virtually everything can be done using just a gamepad controller.
  • Added layering support, so a map can have multiple layers.
  • The zider project is no longer a standalong exe, it has been change into a class library.
  • Added SMLOP: Heroes which is a game that is being developed by me that uses the zider engine to run it.
  • The engine now makes use of the content pipeline for loading game files

Lots of new content added

Published 4/8/2007 by createdbyx in Example | Games | News | Reviews | XNA
Tags: , , ,
I have ported over some more of my old content from the previous incarnations of the createdbyx.com website.
I have also decided to re upload the numerous incarnations of my old websites. You can find some of them listed here ...
The contact page can now be found by hovering your mouse over the Home link at the top of the site.

Also fixed some minor spelling mistakes and formatting on various pages. A new XNA example project wa added as well called HealthBarProject. HealthBarProject demonstrates one way to display a health bar that floats above a desired object using the Viewport.Project method and 2D sprites rendered with a SpriteBatch object. The health bar also scales itself depending on the distance from the camera's position.
View Screenshot

Created by: X

Just another personal website in this crazy online world

Name of author Dean Lunz (aka Created by: X)
Computer programming nerd, and tech geek.
About Me -- Resume