I can do this...

HackUberGeek

Shared on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 06:42

So if you didn't see it, here's yesterday's post. I am pretty much picking up where I left off. Read that if you need to. :D

My adventures of XNA Creator's Club continued last night. In 15 minutes I did the basic tutorial where you draw a graphic (I used the .jpg of my avatar) on the screen and get it to bounce around like a screen saver.) Again this took almost no independent thought on my part, but at least I am getting a better feel for the parts of the code. I definitely see patterns about where things should be, and where the game logic is built. Since I was feeling adventurous I didn't stop, and I attempted several of the customizations recommended by the help file (like adding a second sprite, adding collision detection, and steering the sprite with the controller).

This was cool. I had taken a pre-built MS sample and moved it over yesterday, and today I followed direction enough to get something there that I had done personally. But there was a whole application I hadn’t touched yet, and I had heard good things about it. The TorqueX Game Builder by Garage Games is supposed to handle some of the heavy lifting for you. I honestly didn’t know what that meant when I started yesterday. But learning from my XNA Game Studio mistake, I cracked open some of the help docs. (Again, these were quite good) and it told me to use some added templates to the XNA game studio to get started with them. Ah, but if you read yesterday, you know that the laptop I am using doesn’t run any of the windows based games (it’s graphics card sucks), and all of these were set up to be compiled for windows, not the 360. I was distraught, but only for a bit. The people at garage games have seen a weakness in the Strategy MS had, and fixed it. And actually I don’t know if there is a way to do it in game studio or not, I bet there is, but TorqueX gave me a convertor. All you do is point to the game source file for windows, and it converts it to a 360 source file. Now I don’t know what happens if one of the commands that windows uses isn’t supported for the 360 (and there are some), but the games I am looking at are so simple that it hasn’t been a problem. So I converted a few of their demos and was off to the races on the 360.

 

I didn’t even tinker with them, but that is supposed to be easy as well. We’ll see about that later today.

 

Comments

rabbmasterflash's picture
Submitted by rabbmasterflash on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 07:27
do you have a coding background? I have done some, C++ mainly and some web development and I have been wanting to mess with XNA
HackUberGeek's picture
Submitted by HackUberGeek on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 08:33
I have no formal training, and coding that I do at work on a daily basis is only in scripting languages (mostly VBScript, also batch, PowerShell, and a few proprietary languages that get “compiled” like WiseScript and Auto-It). I also have built a few web-based applications in both ASP and PHP. I tinkered with Visual Basic just a very tiny little bit, and lost motivation. So while I have some of the concepts of object oriented programming, and I pick up basic scripting languages quickly, I am truly a rookie at this. This is clearly more sophisticated than other development projects I have ever tried.

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