Dec 10, 2009 - Molly the Were-Zompire is released on XBox Live Indie Games! Gamers around the world weep for joy!
“Molly the Were-Zompire is the best game on the XBox Live Marketplace that stars me.” – Molly the Were-Zompire
Molly the Were-Zompire is now available for your downloading pleasure. Experience life as a werewolf-zombie-vampire-girl hybrid firsthand! Eat brains! Don’t eat brains! Choose what kinds of brains to eat! The choices are endless! Top-notch hand drawn art that looks like it was drawn by an 8-year old! Text! More text! All this and more can be yours for a mere 80 MS points!
Here's a free code to whoever gets it first - "P977B-7HGW6-CYXM6-YCWBX-TMBV6"
Wow, last week was an insane week for quality XBox Live Indie Games. In addition to my own, Molly the Were-Zompire, we also saw:
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas (240 MS) - Fantastic single screen 2D platformer.
Bonk (80 MS) - Best Breakout/Arkanoid clone I've seen yet.
Gerbil Physics (80 MS) - Excellent puzzle game where you use bombs & stuff to knock down Gerbil blocks.
Leave Home (240 MS) - Mindblowingly good sidescrolling shmup where the levels vary depending on your score.
All of those titles are must-buys IMO. Leave Home in particular amazes me - it's like a Bit.Trip game but 10x more awesome & at half the price.
Wow, last week was an insane week for quality XBox Live Indie Games. In addition to my own, Molly the Were-Zompire, we also saw:
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas (240 MS) - Fantastic single screen 2D platformer.
Bonk (80 MS) - Best Breakout/Arkanoid clone I've seen yet.
Gerbil Physics (80 MS) - Excellent puzzle game where you use bombs & stuff to knock down Gerbil blocks.
Leave Home (240 MS) - Mindblowingly good sidescrolling shmup where the levels vary depending on your score.
All of those titles are must-buys IMO. Leave Home in particular amazes me - it's like a Bit.Trip game but 10x more awesome & at half the price.
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas is pretty awesome...but levels 91-94 (specifically 94) are killing me. I have no idea how to do 94 and getting there is a pain in and of itself.
I tried Bonk but wasn't crazy about it...it was a little too complex for my tastes. I would kill for a straight-up Arkanoid 2: Revenge of Doh re-release. That was my favorite game back in the day.
Yeah, despite the over-familiar glowy neon techno graphics, Leave Home is probably the most polished Indie game I've played. It would have made an excellent 400msp XBLA release.
On a different note, I was looking at the Dream Build Play competition page (http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx) and it mentions that all entrants get a free 12 month XNA creators club trial membership. Does this let you deploy to the Xbox? How does it differ from the $99 membership you normally have to pay for?
What's stopping someone entering the competition, claiming their free trial and then not bothering to submit anything to the DBP competition, saving themselves $99?
Yeah, despite the over-familiar glowy neon techno graphics, Leave Home is probably the most polished Indie game I've played. It would have made an excellent 400msp XBLA release.
On a different note, I was looking at the Dream Build Play competition page (http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx) and it mentions that all entrants get a free 12 month XNA creators club trial membership. Does this let you deploy to the Xbox? How does it differ from the $99 membership you normally have to pay for?
What's stopping someone entering the competition, claiming their free trial and then not bothering to submit anything to the DBP competition, saving themselves $99?
You can use a trial membership to deploy and test your game, but you can't actually sell your game on the marketplace or access any of the premium content on the XNA site. Note that if testing your game is all you want to do at the moment you can just enter the competition without submitting anything, but if you actually submit a valid entry you will receive a 4-month premium membership for free.
I was going to come in and rave about Leave Home, but I figured Rainbow had already beaten me to it -- and he has! I admittedly don't browse through the new Indie Games list too often, but I was intrigued by the title and art, saw that it was proudly labeled a "time limited score attack shooter," tried the demo and bought it on impulse. My only reservation is that it doesn't show your high score onscreen (only in the options menu) but the game is amazing. A procedurally generated Kenta Cho-style shmup that becomes more difficult as you score higher; it's like the Pac-Man CE of shmups!
Does anyone know what happened to Ziggyware? The site seems to have vanished off the internet. I don't know if it's moving or temporary, or what. I hope it isn't gone forever, because it was probably the best resource around for XNA stuff.
The game will sell at 240 MS points, and just like with the iPhone version we have some sweet updates in the pipes which includes bosses, new environments, additional slash animation etc etc.
What’s more, these downloadable contents will be FREE for those who have purchased the game early, as a mean to thank our early supporters (or is it as a mean to punish those cowards who’d want to wait for the updates I never recall).
So might be worth buying sooner rather than later!!
Pretty as it is, I found the gameplay in the Twin Blade's demo really dull. It's literally just walking forward and slashing zombies.
One game I have been absolutely loving is Arkedo's Pixel. Really pretty and quirky/funny, with some really imaginative platform elements. Best game I've come across on Indie games by far. Just completed it, the last level is evil.
Pretty as it is, I found the gameplay in the Twin Blade's demo really dull. It's literally just walking forward and slashing zombies.
That was the impression I got as well.
Yeah it starts off a bit simple, but once you start upgrading the Nun's powers, getting new guns and increasing numbers of tougher zombies start spoiling your day, the game becomes quite a blast. Flamethrower FTW.
You have to survive 31 days, I'm up to about 15 and starting to repeatedly die when I'm not careful now.
Also, that Pixel game looks fantastic, I'm loving some of the 2D platformers we're getting through Indie games. I've not played any of the Arkedo series yet, but all 3 have looked rather good (Pixel looking the strongest). Will pick that up for sure, that video sold it to me.
Pretty as it is, I found the gameplay in the Twin Blade's demo really dull. It's literally just walking forward and slashing zombies.
One game I have been absolutely loving is Arkedo's Pixel. Really pretty and quirky/funny, with some really imaginative platform elements. Best game I've come across on Indie games by far. Just completed it, the last level is evil.
I now have the dubious distinction of grappling with Title Safe Area issues on a game where every last iota of the map is important (yay geography game), not to mention the HUD. And the art I need to display doesn't cooperate very well with 16:9 (have to heighten it to fit the mid-bottom HUD) or 4:3 (have to shrink the wide map to fit it in.)
I had heard good things about Miner Dig Deep so I got it. It's just like a old DOS shareware game I remember playing when I was a kid. I've gotten to a point where elevators cannot go through the dirt. Does anyone know if there are blueprints for an upgraded elevator?
I had heard good things about Miner Dig Deep so I got it. It's just like a old DOS shareware game I remember playing when I was a kid. I've gotten to a point where elevators cannot go through the dirt. Does anyone know if there are blueprints for an upgraded elevator?
I now have the dubious distinction of grappling with Title Safe Area issues on a game where every last iota of the map is important (yay geography game), not to mention the HUD. And the art I need to display doesn't cooperate very well with 16:9 (have to heighten it to fit the mid-bottom HUD) or 4:3 (have to shrink the wide map to fit it in.)
Joy!
Maybe you could have a movable, zoomable viewport? That would be my advice. Maybe with the right stick you can scroll the map around, and if you go off the edges it just wraps around.
Has anyone been using Torque X? I just downloaded the trial, getting all excited to have an easy to use level editor (2D), only to find there are no tutorials on using it. WTF?
I figured out how it works from some random youtube videos, at least for basic stuff like drawing tiles and sprites, but loading it into the game is a mystery (it just loads the default "move red circle around aimlessly" level). How do they expect people to pay $150 for this when there is no useful documentation?
Has anyone been using Torque X? I just downloaded the trial, getting all excited to have an easy to use level editor (2D), only to find there are no tutorials on using it. WTF?
I figured out how it works from some random youtube videos, at least for basic stuff like drawing tiles and sprites, but loading it into the game is a mystery (it just loads the default "move red circle around aimlessly" level). How do they expect people to pay $150 for this when there is no useful documentation?
I'm a long time owner of various Torque engines and it's always kind of been that way. Documentations seems to be a lot better now (which may not seem like much). There should be a Docs folder in your TorqueX install directory. That may be all the docs you get as a demo user. They have this as well: http://www.torquepowered.com/documentation which I think eventually leads to the Torque Developer Network (TDN) and that will require you to have purchased the product to access it I think. But check it out. You may want to check the GG forums as well - but that Docs folder is probably your best bet.
I don't own TorqueX yet, but I've been using Torque2D - well TorqueGameBuilder - they keep changing the names of shit and its kind of annoying to remember what's what hah. Once I got the hang of things I really liked using the 2D engine.
Has anyone been using Torque X? I just downloaded the trial, getting all excited to have an easy to use level editor (2D), only to find there are no tutorials on using it. WTF?
I figured out how it works from some random youtube videos, at least for basic stuff like drawing tiles and sprites, but loading it into the game is a mystery (it just loads the default "move red circle around aimlessly" level). How do they expect people to pay $150 for this when there is no useful documentation?
I'm a long time owner of various Torque engines and it's always kind of been that way. Documentations seems to be a lot better now (which may not seem like much). There should be a Docs folder in your TorqueX install directory. That may be all the docs you get as a demo user. They have this as well: http://www.torquepowered.com/documentation which I think eventually leads to the Torque Developer Network (TDN) and that will require you to have purchased the product to access it I think. But check it out. You may want to check the GG forums as well - but that Docs folder is probably your best bet.
I don't own TorqueX yet, but I've been using Torque2D - well TorqueGameBuilder - they keep changing the names of shit and its kind of annoying to remember what's what hah. Once I got the hang of things I really liked using the 2D engine.
See, the website/TDN is where I was looking for help. There is no useful information whatsoever in there. You don't need to pay to see the TX docs, just register. It still contains nothing useful, and even some docs have text such as "WHERE DID THIS ARTICLE GO?" and are otherwise empty.
However, opening up the help menu and going to documentation has much more interesting and useful information. I had almost given up completely on TX, but decided to check that after reading your post.
Maybe you could have a movable, zoomable viewport? That would be my advice. Maybe with the right stick you can scroll the map around, and if you go off the edges it just wraps around.
Good idea. Working on it now!
Okay, before I go off to the XNA forums, my world shader lights the normal map perfectly in Windows, but it completely fails to do the normal map on the 360. It doesn't even do per-pixel lighting... it just does vertex lighting, drops in the texture coordinates a-ok, and leaves me hanging.
Code below. Any ideas?
EDITED to remove the looooooooong unignorable code block
See, the website/TDN is where I was looking for help. There is no useful information whatsoever in there. You don't need to pay to see the TX docs, just register. It still contains nothing useful, and even some docs have text such as "WHERE DID THIS ARTICLE GO?" and are otherwise empty.
However, opening up the help menu and going to documentation has much more interesting and useful information. I had almost given up completely on TX, but decided to check that after reading your post.
Yeah the TDN wiki had a time where it was actually very helpful, then some things got pretty out of date and articles just went away. I've learned enough to feel pretty confident with torque script and creating stuff with TGB. Let me know how it goes.
@Delzhand: TGB is way more robust than gamemaker! I am impressed by some of the things people have created with it though.
I'm porting a game I wrote in Flex/Flash to XNA and am failing utterly to understand how XNA deals with XML files. Given that all my game data and configuration, from animation system to level data and even game rules are stored in xml this is a bit of a square 1 show stopper for me. Rather than boring you all with the specific details and error messages I'm getting does anyone have a link to a tutorial telling me what I should be doing with XML in XNA?
using a statement like ContentManager.Load<List<EntityData>>(myxmlfile).
That's a pretty simplified explanation, but I hope it helps.
Some things to know: You could just put the data in a class in your game, and load it automatically with reflection, but XNA will rebuild all your content if anything in the pipeline changes. So if you change a single integer in your player class and the xml-loading classes are in the same project, you'll have to wait for it all to rebuild before you can launch the game again.
using a statement like ContentManager.Load<List<EntityData>>(myxmlfile).
That's a pretty simplified explanation, but I hope it helps.
Some things to know: You could just put the data in a class in your game, and load it automatically with reflection, but XNA will rebuild all your content if anything in the pipeline changes. So if you change a single integer in your player class and the xml-loading classes are in the same project, you'll have to wait for it all to rebuild before you can launch the game again.
Ah, so you can't just use XMLDocument and do your own data read in then? You have to go through the XNA Content Pipeline?
That's a bit of a bugger, I'm going to have to extensively edit my xml file to deal with that.
Does anyone know of any good fonts to use in game? I need some big, chunky lettering for hi-scores, "START!" and "MULTIPLYER!" type messages and so on.
(game status: after three hours spent swearing at an ethernet cable I finally managed to get the game deployed on the Xbox. And it ran perfectly! Just goes to show that an Xbox 360 is more powerful than a £30 Pentium 4. I'll be able to add many more particles and a few more layers of parallax now!)
Does anyone know of any good fonts to use in game? I need some big, chunky lettering for hi-scores, "START!" and "MULTIPLYER!" type messages and so on.
(game status: after three hours spent swearing at an ethernet cable I finally managed to get the game deployed on the Xbox. And it ran perfectly! Just goes to show that an Xbox 360 is more powerful than a £30 Pentium 4. I'll be able to add many more particles and a few more layers of parallax now!)
you should make the "GO!" and such exclamations into unnecessarily complicated statements, like "BEGIN SHOOTING, NOW!"
I'm really looking for multi-coloured, detailed lettering which I'd probably have to use as a sprite rather than a font (which seem to be monotone). There seems to be no real database of these though. I'll just have to keep looking.
Abaddon is a lot of fun. As I've said before, it has a surprising amount of depth for a top-down shmup, thanks to all the available upgrades to your ship and the mothership you're charged with defending.
Some other recommendations are Pocoro, a clever puzzle game that looks and feels as polished as a Live Arcade title, and Gum Drop Celestial Frontier, another inventive space 'shmup' that trades the usual energy weapons for a tractor beam as your main armament.
Zoku Gojira on
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
Anyone have any idea how to go about creating weapon trails? Drawing primitives seems like a lot of code for very little output, so I'm wondering if there's a simpler way to go about it.
With my complete lack of shader skills, I'd probably try storing the last 10-15 missile (or whatever) positions in an array and displaying a small blurry trail graphic at those positions, with the older positions more transparent than the newer. if you draw each graphic several times at each position, but randomly jiggled slightly, it might create a decent trail line.
Update:
I finally found some decent chunky full-colour fonts (called 'graphical fonts' apparently) here:
Anyone have any idea how to go about creating weapon trails? Drawing primitives seems like a lot of code for very little output, so I'm wondering if there's a simpler way to go about it.
If you mean something like the smoke trail behind a rocket, you could use some sort of particle system. There are two samples on the XNA site (one using sprite batches and one using shaders and a vertex buffer) or you could rig up your own implementation.
Posts
“Molly the Were-Zompire is the best game on the XBox Live Marketplace that stars me.” – Molly the Were-Zompire
Molly the Were-Zompire is now available for your downloading pleasure. Experience life as a werewolf-zombie-vampire-girl hybrid firsthand! Eat brains! Don’t eat brains! Choose what kinds of brains to eat! The choices are endless! Top-notch hand drawn art that looks like it was drawn by an 8-year old! Text! More text! All this and more can be yours for a mere 80 MS points!
Here's a free code to whoever gets it first - "P977B-7HGW6-CYXM6-YCWBX-TMBV6"
Everyone else can download the game at http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585503ab or in the Indie Games section of the XBox Live Marketplace.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Impressions later.
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas (240 MS) - Fantastic single screen 2D platformer.
Bonk (80 MS) - Best Breakout/Arkanoid clone I've seen yet.
Gerbil Physics (80 MS) - Excellent puzzle game where you use bombs & stuff to knock down Gerbil blocks.
Leave Home (240 MS) - Mindblowingly good sidescrolling shmup where the levels vary depending on your score.
All of those titles are must-buys IMO. Leave Home in particular amazes me - it's like a Bit.Trip game but 10x more awesome & at half the price.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas is pretty awesome...but levels 91-94 (specifically 94) are killing me. I have no idea how to do 94 and getting there is a pain in and of itself.
I tried Bonk but wasn't crazy about it...it was a little too complex for my tastes. I would kill for a straight-up Arkanoid 2: Revenge of Doh re-release. That was my favorite game back in the day.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/review-leave-home
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
On a different note, I was looking at the Dream Build Play competition page (http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx) and it mentions that all entrants get a free 12 month XNA creators club trial membership. Does this let you deploy to the Xbox? How does it differ from the $99 membership you normally have to pay for?
What's stopping someone entering the competition, claiming their free trial and then not bothering to submit anything to the DBP competition, saving themselves $99?
You can use a trial membership to deploy and test your game, but you can't actually sell your game on the marketplace or access any of the premium content on the XNA site. Note that if testing your game is all you want to do at the moment you can just enter the competition without submitting anything, but if you actually submit a valid entry you will receive a 4-month premium membership for free.
Medieval nun vs zombies in a manga-style 2D side-scrolling fighter/shooter.
It's pretty fun man, and for an Indie game, pretty damned professional-looking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYi6_q-K5ps&feature=player_embedded
Screens;
Here's the blurb from the site of Press Start Studios;
http://www.press-start-studio.com/
They've also said;
So might be worth buying sooner rather than later!!
One game I have been absolutely loving is Arkedo's Pixel. Really pretty and quirky/funny, with some really imaginative platform elements. Best game I've come across on Indie games by far. Just completed it, the last level is evil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mdrag9lynQ
xbox GT: Big Will C H
That was the impression I got as well.
Yeah it starts off a bit simple, but once you start upgrading the Nun's powers, getting new guns and increasing numbers of tougher zombies start spoiling your day, the game becomes quite a blast. Flamethrower FTW.
You have to survive 31 days, I'm up to about 15 and starting to repeatedly die when I'm not careful now.
Also, that Pixel game looks fantastic, I'm loving some of the 2D platformers we're getting through Indie games. I've not played any of the Arkedo series yet, but all 3 have looked rather good (Pixel looking the strongest). Will pick that up for sure, that video sold it to me.
I'll second this game. I loved it.
I'm still working on my game, started on the HUD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6poa9vUnw
I now have the dubious distinction of grappling with Title Safe Area issues on a game where every last iota of the map is important (yay geography game), not to mention the HUD. And the art I need to display doesn't cooperate very well with 16:9 (have to heighten it to fit the mid-bottom HUD) or 4:3 (have to shrink the wide map to fit it in.)
Joy!
Nope. You have to dig down the hard way.
Maybe you could have a movable, zoomable viewport? That would be my advice. Maybe with the right stick you can scroll the map around, and if you go off the edges it just wraps around.
I figured out how it works from some random youtube videos, at least for basic stuff like drawing tiles and sprites, but loading it into the game is a mystery (it just loads the default "move red circle around aimlessly" level). How do they expect people to pay $150 for this when there is no useful documentation?
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
I'm a long time owner of various Torque engines and it's always kind of been that way. Documentations seems to be a lot better now (which may not seem like much). There should be a Docs folder in your TorqueX install directory. That may be all the docs you get as a demo user. They have this as well: http://www.torquepowered.com/documentation which I think eventually leads to the Torque Developer Network (TDN) and that will require you to have purchased the product to access it I think. But check it out. You may want to check the GG forums as well - but that Docs folder is probably your best bet.
I don't own TorqueX yet, but I've been using Torque2D - well TorqueGameBuilder - they keep changing the names of shit and its kind of annoying to remember what's what hah. Once I got the hang of things I really liked using the 2D engine.
See, the website/TDN is where I was looking for help. There is no useful information whatsoever in there. You don't need to pay to see the TX docs, just register. It still contains nothing useful, and even some docs have text such as "WHERE DID THIS ARTICLE GO?" and are otherwise empty.
However, opening up the help menu and going to documentation has much more interesting and useful information. I had almost given up completely on TX, but decided to check that after reading your post.
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
Good idea. Working on it now!
Okay, before I go off to the XNA forums, my world shader lights the normal map perfectly in Windows, but it completely fails to do the normal map on the 360. It doesn't even do per-pixel lighting... it just does vertex lighting, drops in the texture coordinates a-ok, and leaves me hanging.
Code below. Any ideas?
EDITED to remove the looooooooong unignorable code block
float4x4 World; float4x4 WorldViewProjection; float4x4 WorldInverse; float3 LightPosition; float3 LightColor = float3(1, 1, 1); float LightRange = 12; float LightFalloff = 4; float LightPeriod = 0; float3 AmbientColor = float3(0, 0, 0.65); Texture DiffuseMap; sampler2D DiffuseSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <DiffuseMap>; // FILTER = MIN_MAG_MIP_LINEAR; AddressU = Wrap; AddressV = Wrap; }; float BumpConstant = 8; Texture NormalMap; sampler2D NormalSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <NormalMap>; MinFilter = point; MagFilter = linear; MipFilter = linear; AddressU = Wrap; AddressV = Wrap; }; Texture NoiseMap; sampler2D NoiseMapSampler = sampler_state { Texture = <NoiseMap>; AddressU = Wrap; AddressV = Wrap; }; struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float3 Normal: NORMAL0; float3 Binormal: BINORMAL0; float3 Tangent : TANGENT0; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float LightDistanceModifier : TEXCOORD0; float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD1; float3x3 TangentToWorld: TEXCOORD2; float3 LightDirection : TEXCOORD5; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output = (VertexShaderOutput)0; output.Position = mul(input.Position, WorldViewProjection); output.TangentToWorld[0] = mul(input.Tangent, WorldInverse); output.TangentToWorld[1] = mul(input.Binormal, WorldInverse); output.TangentToWorld[2] = mul(input.Normal, WorldInverse); float3 worldPosition = mul(input.Position, World); output.LightDirection = normalize(LightPosition - worldPosition); output.TexCoord = input.TexCoord; // NEW // Alex's calculations for light distance // Step 1: Distance Check float dx = worldPosition.x - LightPosition.x; float dy = worldPosition.y - LightPosition.y; float dz = worldPosition.z - LightPosition.z; float dist = sqrt((dx * dx) + (dz * dz)); // re-add dy + dy if you want a spherical map // Step 2: Less Than, Greater Than, or within Falloff Range... if(dist >= LightRange && dist < LightRange + sqrt(LightRange) * LightFalloff) { float distCheck = dist - LightRange; float tempIntensity = distCheck / (sqrt(LightRange) * LightFalloff); tempIntensity = -1 * pow(tempIntensity, 2) + 1; output.LightDistanceModifier = tempIntensity; } else if(dist >= LightRange + sqrt(LightRange) * LightFalloff) { output.LightDistanceModifier = 0; } else if(dist < LightRange) { output.LightDistanceModifier = 1; } return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { float4 CityLight = (tex2D(NormalSampler,input.TexCoord)); float3 bump = BumpConstant * (tex2D(NormalSampler, input.TexCoord).rgb - float3(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)); float3 normal = mul(bump, input.TangentToWorld); normal = normalize(normal); float lightAmount = max(dot(normal, input.LightDirection), 0); lightAmount *= input.LightDistanceModifier; // Back to business... float3 BaseTexture = tex2D(DiffuseSampler, input.TexCoord); float Transparency = (tex2D(DiffuseSampler, input.TexCoord)).a; BaseTexture *= saturate(LightColor * lightAmount + AmbientColor); float4 finalColor = float4(BaseTexture, Transparency); if(input.LightDistanceModifier < 0.5 && CityLight.a > 0.15) { // Set up the color float4 yellow = float4(1, 1, 0.7, 1); // Set up the light period using something arbitrary LightPeriod += (input.TexCoord.x * 72 / input.TexCoord.y * 128); // LightPeriod += (tex2D(NoiseMapSampler, input.TexCoord).x + tex2D(NoiseMapSampler, input.TexCoord).y / 2); LightPeriod = sin(radians(LightPeriod)); LightPeriod = (LightPeriod / 3) + 0.66; finalColor = finalColor + (yellow * CityLight.a * (1 - (input.LightDistanceModifier * 2)) * LightPeriod); finalColor.a = 1; } return finalColor; } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { AlphaBlendEnable = TRUE; DestBlend = INVSRCALPHA; SrcBlend = SRCALPHA; Cullmode = CCW; VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } }Yeah the TDN wiki had a time where it was actually very helpful, then some things got pretty out of date and articles just went away. I've learned enough to feel pretty confident with torque script and creating stuff with TGB. Let me know how it goes.
@Delzhand: TGB is way more robust than gamemaker! I am impressed by some of the things people have created with it though.
I'm porting a game I wrote in Flex/Flash to XNA and am failing utterly to understand how XNA deals with XML files. Given that all my game data and configuration, from animation system to level data and even game rules are stored in xml this is a bit of a square 1 show stopper for me. Rather than boring you all with the specific details and error messages I'm getting does anyone have a link to a tutorial telling me what I should be doing with XML in XNA?
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I have a library with these classes:
public abstract class EntityData { } public class WallData : EntityData { public Vector2 Position; public Vector2 Size; }All you really need is a reference to the library in your game and game content, and you should be able to load a file like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <XnaContent> <Asset Type="System.Collections.Generic.List[StageLoader.EntityData]"> <Item Type="StageLoader.WallData"> <Position>0 1200</Position> <Size>2500 100</Size> </Item> <Item Type="StageLoader.WallData"> <Position>0 0</Position> <Size>2500 100</Size> </Item> </Asset> </XnaContent>using a statement like ContentManager.Load<List<EntityData>>(myxmlfile).
That's a pretty simplified explanation, but I hope it helps.
Some things to know: You could just put the data in a class in your game, and load it automatically with reflection, but XNA will rebuild all your content if anything in the pipeline changes. So if you change a single integer in your player class and the xml-loading classes are in the same project, you'll have to wait for it all to rebuild before you can launch the game again.
Ah, so you can't just use XMLDocument and do your own data read in then? You have to go through the XNA Content Pipeline?
That's a bit of a bugger, I'm going to have to extensively edit my xml file to deal with that.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Fake Edit: This seems to say you can use XMLDocument:
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2008/05/30/xml-and-the-content-pipeline.aspx
(game status: after three hours spent swearing at an ethernet cable I finally managed to get the game deployed on the Xbox. And it ran perfectly! Just goes to show that an Xbox 360 is more powerful than a £30 Pentium 4. I'll be able to add many more particles and a few more layers of parallax now!)
you should make the "GO!" and such exclamations into unnecessarily complicated statements, like "BEGIN SHOOTING, NOW!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ICQ3C93RA
Some other recommendations are Pocoro, a clever puzzle game that looks and feels as polished as a Live Arcade title, and Gum Drop Celestial Frontier, another inventive space 'shmup' that trades the usual energy weapons for a tractor beam as your main armament.
Update:
I finally found some decent chunky full-colour fonts (called 'graphical fonts' apparently) here:
http://www.algonet.se/~guld1/index_de.htm
and have added them to my score-multiplyer display:
If you mean something like the smoke trail behind a rocket, you could use some sort of particle system. There are two samples on the XNA site (one using sprite batches and one using shaders and a vertex buffer) or you could rig up your own implementation.