Well I was planning on entering the warmup for the Dream Build Play Contest that Microsoft are currently running, however real-world events (job interviews) mean that I wont have time to build the game I planned, and I dont feel like coming up with a simpler idea now, I lost two days last week, and will lose 4 this week, that’s six days from a two week schedule, so no one will get to see Spacewars Adventure, oh well, we’ll see what happens when the main contest goes live.
Archive for February, 2007
Dream, Build, Play contest
Monday, February 19th, 2007XNA Cutscene Camera Library
Monday, February 5th, 2007I’ve converted my Cutscene Camera from HDL into a small library with a simple API which is designed to allow anyone to create smooth camera moves with the minimum of effort, it even supports changing the field of view. The API makes it easy to incorporate the camera straight into your code by creating View, Projection or View/Projection matrices for you based on the the current time value, and if you need more control you can extract the current camera position, look at target and Field Of View directly and build your own matrices.
You can download the library which contains instructions on how to use it, plus a small demo application here.
I’ve been Spammed
Thursday, February 1st, 2007One of my posts seemed to have generated a lot of spam, over 400 messages in the past month, what the hell does one post need that many SPAM messages for, do they think that by the 100th message you’ll change your mind about the lies they’re telling and actually click on one of their links. I noticed that the first message said something about new porn blog, well this is not a porn blog, never has and never will be, since that’s against my hosting rules, and I think that it was some sort of marker for every retarded spammer in the world who thinks we all need the shit they peddle.
I’ve deleted the post in question, so hopefully all those links to the page they’re using will fail, since it’s just one message I’ll see if it stops it for now, I can handle it at the moment, but they’re stealing my limited web server bandwidth. If it starts up again I may have to instigate registration to post comments, but I’d rather not do that.
XNABench – an XNA Benchmark program
Thursday, February 1st, 2007After playing around getting a Poser model into XNA I decided that I really needed to do some performance testing to compare the PC to the Xbox 360, so I decided to build a little benchmark program, I’ve called this XNABench and it’s designed to test various areas of the PC and Xbox’s performance. The benchmarks will be devided into three seperate sections.
Visual Tests – These are done using a really complex scene exported from poser, which mimics the sort of scenes a normal developer would create, with lots of RenderState changes and even render target changes.
Synthetic Tests – These are designed to find out how the hardware reacts to differing batch sizes of polygons, using a sphere of various batch sizes (upto 49152 tris per batch)
CPU Tests – These test various aspects of processing speed, including Matrix operations and looping.