Answer Questions

• Lars E.Nes What games or applications are allowed?

  Hellos I have a few questions regarding the content of the games: Is it allowed to put out advergames sponsored by 3rd party commmercial companies (Either games that feature sponsored splash screens in menu etc or even product placement in the game) Then what about adult content Like how much Blood, Gore, Drugs, Nudity is allowed Do games have to be politically correct cheers Nils How would they enforce it since distribution (at least at the start) is done outside of the 360 If the content were uploaded to MS servers for distribution it would be a different story, but I can't see any way to control what I email to someone so they can compile and run it on their 360. So therefore commercial content cann ...Show All

• Hatzi74 bug with adding components, or did i do something wrong?

  i have started working on a pong clone, and with hardly any resources available, i've been doing my best. i saw the game components video and using that and some forum posts i have found here, got a menu component set up that would draw a menu. just some basic stuff. the problem comes when i drag & drop the menu component onto the design view of my Pong.cs file. i click on build, and get this error: "The type name 'Menu' does not exist in the type 'Pong.Pong'". i am able to fix the error, and the project compiles and runs as expected by changing the line this.menu1 = new Pong.Menu(); to this this.menu1 = new Menu(); in my Pong.Designer.cs file. i noticed the comments in that file stating not to edit it from the code view, but ...Show All

• jkeele I, j and k components of quaternions

  How do we get quaternion components separately We want to write directly in the program i,j or k in order to make rotation with our camera. Quaternions are made of a real and a complex part : i,j,k are commonly refered to as the real parts. How to get real part is dependend on the API you are using... D3DX defines the quaternion as a struct so with DirectX : D3DXQUATERNION q; float i = q.x; float j = q.y; float k = q.z; ...Show All

• kymaita General strategy question about XNA

  What is MSFT's strategy with GSE I mean, is it a stripped-down version of GS Pro meant to spark interest in GS Pro Is it actually going the core of GS Pro, and the hobbyist/student community is acting as both first adopters and beta (or even alpha) testers of the product Is it a way for MSFT to foster some kind of indie/small game shop Xbox360 game development (The latter would seem to be slightly odd: the actual dev kits, I gather, are not a minor expense, in addition to what I'm assuming are certification and any other testing expenses; I would think that releasing an alternate path for Xbox game development might cannibalize an existing revenue stream...) It would seem to me to be just simpler to wait for GS Pro to come out, and l ...Show All

• Teddy79 Storage

  I a bit confused about what things I need to consider when working with storage in XNA. For instance, I normally use xml files to to store data (map files, config). I want to be able to develop simple games that run both on the xbox as well as pc... so my confusion is what do I do about storage to make sure I don't run into any gotchas from one platform to the next I understand that I should be using StorageContainer and StorageDevice... but is that just for for storing game state like save games and so forth Or can I access the game directory using those... I need to be able to do simple things like load map files. What location do I store these files so that I can access them on both platforms at run time. ...Show All

• hazz Smooth movement

  I did a "game" where a ball bounce around the screen. It's running at 60 fps but it isn't a smooth movement. It's an issue from XNA Framework Beta I am working with SpriteBatch class... So you're moving 2 pixels every update, 60 times a second. That should provide fairly smooth movement. I'd try to islote it to make sure it isn't your movement logic. Try creating a simple application that just moves the sprite back and forth across the screen and see if it performs the same. You may also want to double check the elapsed times to make sure your game is running at 60 frames a second. Here is (it's not complete): private SpriteBatch fBatch = null ; private Texture2D fTextur ...Show All

• NoNameHere "Programming RolePlaying Games with DirectX" help

  Has anyone else read this book I am a current student at the Art Institute and recently purchased this book. The code they have is based on DirectX9.0b, so it requires a lot of changes from IDirect to ID3X...and I just started learning DirectX with this book. I'm just wondering if anyone else read this book and were able to confront those errors. Anyone know any good resources to learn DirectX9 and/or tutorials on creating an ideal DirectX wrapper. Thanks, Umesh Yea, I'll have to check that version out. I want to start working on my senior project but the end of this quarter (December), so thought that book could help out. The concepts are nice but not worth it if you are wasting so much time trying to im ...Show All

• FrankLi Game Programming is very Hard

  I've been reading DirectX sdk tutorials and MDX tutorials and things like that, and it seems VERY VERY VERY hard. Will this new XNA studio and the documentation simplify this All these vectors and whatnot is very complicated and I'm having trouble understanding seemingly basic concepts in game programming in 3d. Shawn Hargreaves wrote: You don't need to worry about render loops any more with the XNA Framework - that's one of the things we take care of for you! god bless you ;) I have a few questions: 1) What is the best performing render loop (in your opinion) I've encountered ones that use application idle events, others that use on paint events, and some really long ones that I don't have any idea how they wo ...Show All

• JaredJ XBOX360 DirectX Graphics Caps?

  Can someone post, or let me know where I can find a listing of the XBOX360's Graphics Capabilities: like those displayed under "Graphics Adapters" in the DirectX Caps Viewer on Windows CanAutoGenerateMipMap : False That's quite surprising! Given it has cool render-to-texture functions, actually generating the MIP maps using target rendering would be a snap. Annoying if you have to do it yourself. Sounds like you have a faulty kit... Jon Watte wrote: CanAutoGenerateMipMap : False That's quite surprising! Given it has cool render-to-texture functions, actually generating the MIP maps using target rendering would be a snap. Annoying if you have to do it yourself. ...Show All

• clarkewu Problems implementing a skybox

  Perhaps somebody with more experience could help me. I want to implement the skybox example from the DirectX SDK (Samples/C++/Direct3D/StateManager) and I've copied and renamed the following files (skybox01.x, skybox02.dds and skybox03.fx) to my project folder and have added them to the content pipeline. But I don't get it managed to load the skybox with her texture and set the camera to the center of the box, I think because I don't know how to handle the effects of the *.fx file and how to transform the box correct. (I'm new to XNA and I only have tried out the simple 3D examples with BasicEffects from the help files so far.) So if somebody has the time to show me how to handle these files correctly, I would be very glad. (You c ...Show All

• SHutchinson reduces texture color depth

  Hi! I can't figure out an issue, and it is somewhat critical for the visual quality. I modified my skybox component to use the content pipeline. This means that the content pipeline should take care of loading all thextures defined in the .x file. And it does that, but the problem is that when i run the program, my skybox textures look as if their color depth has been reduced to 16 or less bits per pixel. For the skybox I used a .x model that contains a cube with faces pointing inwards. I took it form an SDK sample, and modified the textures. I even tried making all textures into .dds What should I try next Did anybody encounter this problem also By default textures that are part of models are processed ...Show All

• camtx1400 Single letter prefix before a variable

  I was wondering if anyone can point me towards some information on having a single letter prefix before AND after a variable name. Is that a standard practice I have come across this in a number of different programs, yet still a bit unclear why they are used. Any info would be appreciated. Some examples of what I have seen: aFireball.Value.Source mWizard = new Sprite.... rotation_angle += .03M; The letters before a variable name are usually to indicate scope and data type. If you see something like: rotation_angle += .03f; the "f" indicates a float data type value (I'm not sure what "M" is in your example). The MSDN site has a page on naming conventions in .NET. Almost ...Show All

• Muhammad Adel DreamBuildPlay is up!!!

  Now go register!!   Actual contest details to come the week of Feb 5th I don't really know any valid zipcode and phone number for the US, nor any address for that matter. Thanks for the advice, anyway! I guess I'll just have to wait until they fix this. Plese, Someone at Microsoft.... the drembuildplay site, even though the competition should be global, does not allow non-US people to register. I don't live in the U.S., so I can't choose any state, the zipcodes in my country are 6 digits long, and the telephone numbers are not in the US format.  Edit: didn't see errolian's post before i posted this. P.S. did I mention I passed from neutral ...Show All

• Mark Macumber Packaging assets

  I haven't got into using XNA as of yet, however I very much like the idea to play my games on the Xbox360 (blah blah blah). I see that the XNA team has put large amounts of effort into some asset management in XNA, that includes the XACT audio cues for like "make it possible to change the sound triggered by some event without doing it in the programming". I'm fairly deep into the process of making my customized packaging format with the goal to essentially archive anything (textures, sounds etc) into a single or more packages. There are several reasons, one of them because I started before the XNA project was convened, and to ease distributions on levels and mods by packing several files, textures, sounds, scripts in a single package file. ...Show All

• MaggieChan How to Launch a XNA game in a new thread ?

  Hello, So, no, this thread is not a tutorial on how to do it. And I am a beginner at thread programming. I ll start by explaining why and what I would like to do. So I am planning on creating a game that can be played by multiple persons either on the same machine, or using network. I though that having a thread listening to input events was a good idea. On thread for each input devices (keyboard / mouse / game pad ... ). I also wanted to have a thread that managed rendering. And information sharing was done through a FIFO buffer. External thread are writers, while the receiving thread was the consummer. It would be something like the following: A "device listener thread", lets call it a playerManagement thread (PMT), receive som ...Show All