So I had bowling league game night last night and it was not pretty. I went down to a 139 because I couldn't pick up my spares, then it got worse… yes a ninety one or four I forget exactly which, either way not good.

I then bowled an extra game after league which came out to a 151, which was awesome considering I rolled a 7/2/- in the tenth.

[sigh]

If anyone ever wants to play some Marvel Ultimate Alliance on Xbox Live (Xbox 360), give me a message sometime!

AWannaBe

What it is code turkeys!

So I’ve been playing around with the XNA 3.0 Framework and what I’ve learned from James Silva’s book Building XNA 2.0 Game: A Practical Guide for Independent Game Development for a few days now and have come across some interesting “break through” or ten, or what I should state amounts to a break through for me.

NOTE: For those that don’t James Silva was the winner of the 2007 Dream, Build and Play contest.

I thought I’d share some of what I’ve “learned” in the hopes that it may be beneficial to those also searching for the same type of information.

So most people “know” that the best way to develop a game is to have a set of  robust tools so that you can more easily create and implement your game assets.

Well those that have played around with XNA know that in order to create a set of tools like a map editor, character editor, etc you typically have to run through the game engine and that has a certain set of limitations and drawbacks.

There is however an alternative… a way to get closer to that ever elusive UnrealEd style editor that you all might conjure up in your heads when you first hear the words level editor uttered in rapid succession.

There are a set of tutorials over at the XNA Creators Club site that talk about doing just such a thing (well the beginning ideas of such a thing).

• WinForms Series 1: Graphics Device
• WinForms Series 2: Content Loading

[These examples given are for 3D but could be applied to 2D as well.]

The “thing” being running the game engine (of sorts) within a Windows form so that you can have a more robust Windows style editor which is event based. (Games are typically based on a time model and not an event model.)

I however came across an interesting article by one Pedro Guida titled XNA & Beyond: The Path to VS 2008. In the article he talks about how to get the game engine to draw inside of panel control!

It’s pretty slick, I modified his code slightly so that makes more sense to me (which is difficult most times) but basically you can add the following to any old Windows Form class (which has a Panel Control attached to it named PrimaryPanel):

   1: public IntPtr PanelHandle

   2:         {

   3:             get

   4:             {

   5:                 return this.PrimaryPanel.IsHandleCreated ? this.PrimaryPanel.Handle : IntPtr.Zero;

   6:             }

   7:         }

Then in your game class add the following:

Then in your game engine class (derived from Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game) just place the following:

   1: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)

   2: {

   3:     base.Draw(gameTime);

   4:     this.GraphicsDevice.Present(this.myForm.PanelHandle);

   5: }

   6:  

   7: void myForm_HandleDestroyed(object sender, EventArgs e)

   8: {

   9:     this.Exit();

  10: }

  11:  

  12: void gameWindowForm_Shown(object sender, EventArgs e)

  13: {

  14:     ((Form)sender).Hide();

  15: }

  16:  

  17: protected override void Initialize()

  18: {

  19:     base.Initialize();

  20:  

  21:     Form gameWindowForm = (Form)MyForm.FromHandle(this.Window.Handle);

  22:  

  23:     gameWindowForm.Shown+=new EventHandler(gameWindowForm_Shown);

  24:  

  25:     myForm = new MyForm();

  26:     myForm.HandleDestroyed+=new EventHandler(myForm_HandleDestroyed);

  27:     myForm.Show();

  28: }

Then rebuild and run, POW! You have windows form running your game engine within a Panel Control. Baby steps my friend, baby steps. Now this may not be too practical or performance efficient in some or even most cases but it’s a good starter to understand the potential you can explore using the System.WIndows.Forms and Microsoft.Xna.Framework namespaces.

I know it’s not that visually impressive but for someone poking around XNA this is a pretty sweet thing, like peanut butter and lamb.

I’m seriously you guys.

More to follow.

Hey all I know it’s been quite the minute… but I’ve been in the middle of another move which has taken considerable amounts of my time.

I’m probably not going to update that often, because of another side project this one with a time limit though.

I’ve entered the MS Dream Build and Play contest. [http://www.dreambuildplay.com]

For which I’ve started researching and prototyping some game engines for.

I’ll update you more when I have the chance I may even start another blog (yes I know) just for the content progress.

Peace and have a great weekend all!

Mr. Belvedere : DVD Box Art

Mr. Belvedere, remember it? Well if you’re a “child of the eighties” or a lonesome dove passing through then you should recall catching at least a clip of Bob Uecker yelling at that “portly” English fellow. ;)

Well it came out today on DVD and can be had from $31 – $40 [US] depending on where you look.

The show’s cast:

Christopher Hewett
Ilene Graff
Rob Stone
Tracy Wells
Brice Beckham
Bob Uecker

Preview / Clip can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK//video/screenplay/vi4110877465/

I just don’t know what to say, I want to be funnier but it’s just not (to me).

:FYI:

So those of you who’ve installed an application on the Microsoft platform have no doubt run into issues from time to time when installing an MSI package (Microsoft System Installer).

I recently ran into a problem where an MSI package would just not start up correctly and nearly instantly tell me that it was interrupted and could not continue. In order to determine the culprit I had to try to install the package with logging enabled; [msiexec /l* x:\install.log /i "%PATH_TO_PACKAGE%"].

Once the log file was created I had to search through to locate the actual error that was causing my problem, which I did and found the following non-descript error code; (0×800cc810).

After a few minutes of digging I discovered that this is typically related to an MS IIS installation error of some sort. In order to fix it I just reinstalled the local IIS (through Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs).

Ran my MSI package again and POW!!! No Installation issues ran through without a hitch. (So to speak.)

Well for those of you (like me) who’ve been playing Halo Wars off and on for the past week and I don’t know about you but I get the feeling like it’s a dumbed down version of an RTS. It really makes me long for Starcraft 2 to see how that’s going to be unfortunately that won’t be on any console which makes me a sad panda indeed.

StarCraft 2 : Screenshot

[Oops now only fourteen more gamerscore to go, until I reach the 10,000 mark.]

How the hell did I get such a weird gamerscore? Luxor2 and that’s all I’m going to say about that… never ever play that game. EVER.