Nuclex

This weekend, I've been thinking about ways to create an installer for my game project. For desktop applications, the technology of choice is of course Microsoft Windows Installer, which generates handy .msi files. It also automatically tracks which steps are neccessary to uninstall the application and it has the convenient repair function. However, when it comes to installing the .NET Framework, the DirectX Runtime or the XNA Framework, there seems to be no existing solution for integrating these steps into a single .msi package.

Another option would be to use NSIS, which requires you to write the uninstall actions yourself and also uses a rather cryptic scripting language, but otherwise provides all the features you expect from a modern installer. It even has LZMA compression (known from 7-Zip), which is far superior to the compression ratio of the .cab files embedded in .msi packages.

I couldn't get my head wrapped around the declarative programming style used by WiX yet, so unless I discover a nice free MSI authoring toolkit that can be in automated builds, I'll probably go with NSIS.

Well, whatever I'll choose in the end, I've written a small DLL that can detect whether the .NET Framework (1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0) is installed, whether DirectX (9.0) is available, whether the XNA Framework (1.0/1.0 Refresh) is installed and whether the AGEIA PhysX System Software is in place. The DLL is written in pure C++ and doesn't rely on anything, not even the C++ runtime libraries. It can be interfaced from both NSIS and MSI.

If anyone wants to help create an installer template for XNA games, be welcome!

If you write a game in Flash, you will have to accept some performance limitations and make some compromises in terms of available technology (eg. no Ageia PhysX or hardware shaders for you). But nearly everybody can play the game right in his browser, dramatically expanding the number of people that see your game.

Now Microsoft is hurling a competitor to Flash at the market: Microsoft Silverlight. It is based on the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and WPF, which makes it about 1000 times more powerful than Flash. WPF also includes 3D graphics and is way faster than flash, allowing for full-screen animations where flash would slow down to a crawl. It's being ported to Mono/Linux as well, with the help if none other than Microsoft!

I've been fiddling around with font rendering again this weekend. For my upcoming game, I wanted a cool intro effect like in some movies, where the displayed text is very very slowly expanding. But I couldn't quite replicate that effect with the XNA SpriteFont class. Even with antialiasing turned on, the borders of the text were flickering. Using very large font sizes resulted in hopelessly oversized .xnb files with only a slight improvement for the unsteady borders.

So my new solution was to write a component that renders vector-based text instead of bitmaps. Extracting the vector data from a font was a bit harder than I had expected because fonts consist mostly of complicated second and third order bezier curves. I managed to break these down into plain straight line segments and am now in the possession of a content pipeline importer that converts .ttf fonts into arrays of line segments. Behold:

This article will explain how you can install the freely available Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition together with the Windows SDK required to create Windows applications and use most of the code available on the 'net.

If you're interested in doing Windows game development in C++, Visual C++ 2005 Express is a great choice because it combines a world class IDE with the optimizing version of the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler. If you're concerned with standards compliance, rest assured that Microsoft's compiler is among the best.

The only obstacle for game programmers is that the Express Edition of Visual C++ 2005 doesn't include the Platform SDK, Microsoft's collection of headers and libraries for windows development, including the all-time famous Windows.h. This article will guide you through the entire process of installing Visual C++ 2005 Express, setting up the Platform SDK and configuring your build environment.

I decided to put some work into creating an editor that I can later use for building the levels and perhaps even include with my game. XNA gave me a hard time getting it to work inside a Windows.Forms application and I had to rewrite several of the XNA classes until I had a properly working XNA UserControl allowing me to render my game world inside the editor window.

Of course, the editor had to look modern and neat, with dockable panels and color gradients all over the place. As it turned out, there is no built-in solution for docking windows in the .NET Framework, so, given my plans to release the game's source code, I had to find a solution that was both free and provided a decent user experience.

I know, as always, I'm a bit late with updates, but just in case you don't know yet, the Microsoft guys finally opened www.xna.com. Finally, a complete website dedicated to XNA instead of the cramped MSDN section!

The developer area has been moved to http://creators.xna.com, including a wealth of tutorials and a revamped discussion area.

This weekend, I tried finally getting texture splatting to work for my Island War terrain renderer... and failed miserably :D. Look for yourself:

There's a lot of tuning to do until this crappy... something... looks like believable terrain. I'm not aiming for photorealism, but I'm not settling for a surreal landscape that stands out like a children's painting would in an art gallery, either :)

Alright, my next game is finally on its way. The game's working title will be "Island War", which describes the setting of this game pretty well: small islands at war with each other.

And it won't be like any other strategy title you might have played. I'm planning to remove the tediousness from the RTS genre by getting rid of micro management and unit placement.

I decided to try a different approach to the design of this game than I did with Ball Race. Instead of creating several GameComponents (like SceneGraph, EffectManager and GameStateManager) and spreading the game's logic between them, I'll try to model the game world in an object model designed for convenient use, so I can later set up my levels and launch the game with just a few lines of code.

The code so far incorporates an asset management system, the entire world expressed in an object model with load/save capability and can render dynamic height-mapped terrain allowing for real-time terrain deformation by explosions and other influences. I haven't written the actual shaders yet, so this will look much better once I can get the shaders going.

Today it dawned upon me that I forgot something important in the geometry generation engine of my game: How can the player distinguish the goals from the traps? Both are holes, only that the former one makes you win the game while the latter one makes you lose the game. Oops! :)

After today's changes, the maze consisted of three parts: The walls, the floor (with donut gaps around holes that are goals) and the goal rings. The goal rings fill the gaps left open in the floor and use a different effect that draws a checkered flag texture so the player can clearly recognize the goal holes.

All that's left now is to polish the game a bit, add gamepad support and create the 10 challenge mode levels. Looking back at the progress, I have to say that I underestimated the amount of work required quite a bit. It's great to see some interest from the XNA community, some people have linked me in their blogs and I even got interviewed about my game and my thoughts on XNA. More on that if everything works out as expected.

The release of "Project Balance" will be on December 11th the same day the XNA final is due.

Finally got a new graphics card. I had seriously considered buying a GeForce 8800, but given the card's insane price tag, the fact that I'm developing for XNA (nothing to gain from DirectX 10) and ATI's recent announcement about their next generation GPU being out soon to lower the prices, I decided to go for a cheap ATI Radeon X1950 card.

I didn't totally stop working on the game, however, and wrote a small menu system that I now use to display the game's main menu and the level selector. Debugging could still be accomplished running the game in a 320x240 window by using the reference rasterizer for rendering, which produces about 1 frame in the time it takes you to wash your car, take a walk or phone a friend...

Aforementioned menu system is already being used to drive the main menu and a level selector, both fully working at the time of this writing. The buttons themselfes are looking rather dull and I'm not sure yet whether I should just try to do my best in Paint.NET or whether I should go looking for an artist...

There will be 10 built-in levels that the player can try to beat in a certain time to complete the game. I think 10 levels are just right to entertain the player for a while and then let him off before the game gets boring. I truly think it's a nice and fun game, but, after all, it's just a ball rolling around on a table -- hardly enough variety to make 100 levels worthwhile :)

This Monday, my graphics card decided that 18 months of service are more than enough and, well, quit. During bootup, it now displays utter garbage and as soon as windows loads the graphics driver, it hangs. The only good thing is that, as long as I run the generic VGA driver, my desktop displays fine.

I guess I should have taken the scratching noises that the card's fan made for some months now more serious. The fan is still rotating, but probably not at full speed. Needless to say that this is quite a show stopper for my XNA development during this week, still hoping that the new card I ordered will be here before the weekend...