I kinda “geeked out” this weekend, which is one of several reasons why the blog has been neglected the past few days (sorry). As I mentioned a few weeks back, I downloaded the XNA release to play with. Hadn’t had much chance to really dive in until just this past Saturday, tho. I’d done a little playing around with the textures and the like, but an hour at a time just doesn’t let you get very far.
This weekend, I kind of just dived in and lost myself. Too much fun… and yes, I’m a geek.
Still didn’t get a lot done that I can actually show. A fair amount of back end server code; wasted a fair amount of time trying to track down why I couldn’t just add a freaking webbrowser control to the project (RTFM: it requires an STA thread); created a bunch of “control” classes under XNA that I could have used standard Windows Forms controls for, but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun; rearranged the object model for my client app two or three times (and I still don’t like it)… good stuff.
A few screenshots, just because I want to… nothing amazing here, I’m afraid. Remember, my artistic abilities rank somewhere around that of a blind paralyzed marmoset.
A basic “choose a location” screen. Map was an old one out of Campaign Cartographer (version 2). You can click and drag the map around to see other portions of it: not sure that’s the best control scheme, since you also click on the map to select areas, but I wanted to do the click and drag thing (basically, just to say I could). Only 3 hotspots defined so far, and lots of stuff would need to be added to make it useful obviously. As you can probably tell, I’m definitely in a “retro” RPG mood at the moment.
The foundation of a “choose your stats” page. Obviously retro, again. This was essentially to test my hotspots implementation, status bar manipulation, and my “lite button” class. I’ve largely got them working as I expect them to.
I had a fair amount of this done from prior efforts, but a fair amount of the time spent revolved around clean-up on this screen.
Yes, still very retro. Tile-based with an isometric view. Lighting and view restriction are tile-based as well. Pretty simple stuff, really. Still a couple of glitches in a few spots where the drawing order needs to be modified… the outstretched sword will look like it’s sticking into the wall, the light value used for a sprite is based on the wrong tile coords, that kind of thing. Movement is smooth and works fairly well, really, with both floor and walls being clipped/sliced smoothly. I’ve got the chat working via the server, and the lone NPC wanders around randomly based on directives from the server as well.
Not too bad for a weekend’s worth of play, if I do say so myself. Not much of general interest, I suppose… but I felt like sharing. 
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 9, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Jonathon Stevens
looking good. I
July 9, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Cameron Sorden
Hah! Holy nostalgia, Batman. I use to love playing Rogue-style top-down or isometric dungeon crawlers (Go go Castle of the Winds and Avernum!).
Keep at it, man.
July 9, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Aaron
Sweet. Keep it up.
July 10, 2007 at 3:59 am
damianov
Thanks for the kind words, guys. Even if you’re just being polite.
I actually wrote the guys at Spidersoft (Avernum, Nethergate) a few years back, got the contact info of the artist that did their sprites. Got busy at work and never found time to follow up, but I thought he did a pretty good job given the format. If I get _really_ ambitious, I may track that info down again…
July 10, 2007 at 11:12 am
Aaron
That’s why I don’t tell white lies — nobody will know when your feedback is genuine.
If you keep me informed about the general style of the game and environments, maybe I can make a few mp3 loops to back them up.
July 10, 2007 at 12:37 pm
damianov
A very generous offer… thank you, Aaron, I will do that.
Right now, it’s all still in the “tech demo” stage or earlier. My thought is to try to post something every couple of weeks in terms of progress, hoping it will help keep me on track and get me to the finish line.
Eventually, I’m kind of planning to just post all the code and let people do their own things with it… which gets back to that idea of helping people demonstrate what they are talking about I rambled on about a couple weeks back.
On a tangential note, I’ve been fairly impressed with some of the XNA-related blogs in terms of the walkthroughs and tutorials… I might try my hand at that as well somewhere down the road, we’ll see. However, my father and brother are the teachers in the family, not I…
January 5, 2012 at 1:01 am
cheap tennis shoes for men atlanta
I have been browsing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all webmasters and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be a lot more useful than ever before.