May 2008 Entries
I sat down tonight and in about three hours or so cranked out the first vestiges of something that kind of maybe resembles Breakout, only using graphics that are possibly worse than anything ever shown on Atari 2600 because well, I made them. Thanks to Joel Neubeck for the video player, and thanks to digital blasphemy for the background (yes I know it's not a free image, I'll be sure to remove it before it goes anywhere). I should also point out: I used some sounds from the Spacewar demo in XNA Game...
Have you ever created a database object and said "OK, this column is going to correspond to this enumeration"? If you're obsessive like me, you might have even gone so far as to create column restrictions for the valid range of values, and created a special SQL type that doesn't really do anything except give you peace of mind. Well, I've got about three such fields on a couple entities on a recent project. Since I wanted those properties to go into C# enumerations, I tried the natural thing: I typed...
There's already rudimentary collision detection in the app, but only for the sides. What if I wanted the balls to detect when they collide? In the demo video you can already see the balls colliding (and, incidentally, the gravity changing from down, then left, up, right, and down again). But how did I get there? Wouldn't you know that XNA has a built-in structure called BoundingSphere that can handle that for you? I defined the bounding sphere as centered around the ball's center point (which was...
My first application in XNA! It's a... well, it's a ball that bounces. I created a new Windows XNA 2.0 application project. I decided to abstract away a Ball object, as well as a GravitySource object. There's a lot of cross-talk -- I'm not sure if this is good or not -- but it's happy enough for me. :-) Gravity seems to be pretty straightforward to implement; the applied speed is going to be a vector direction with a constant speed as the magnitude. Here's the code for the gravity source class: 1:...
I've enjoyed Windows Live Writer as a blog editing tool for a while now (in fact, I think all of my blog entries have been written with it). WLW includes a nifty SDK (one that I haven't had a chance to play with yet) that enables add-in creation. Leo Vildosola created it, based on the more recent plugin I used in fact. This is the third code snippet plugin I've used (just started this one today, in fact) and it's definitely the best. It has some nice features; if you look at the previous post, you'll...
This afternoon, some co-workers were a bit perplexed about why an 'ñ' character in a Spanish name wasn't displaying on a Facebook application we were working on, but rather was coming across as a '?'. Because we were pretty sure that Facebook was UTF-8-encoded, we thought the problem was on our side. Unfortunately, we were on a client's staging/test server, and we weren't able to debug on that machine (we have Visual Studio installed on our own test server). Since we didn't have privileges on the...
In my home PC I've had a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz) for about 4 months now. I'm very pleased with it and, among other benefits, I *know* I can be running SQL Server jobs and not worry about Warcraft or Counterstrike slowing down. :-) Last weekend I noticed that I was getting some substantial artifacts on the screen; crazy stuff was appearing at random intervals, and then I crashed. I finally got Windows back up, started the Asus PC Probe (a tool that reports various stats about your computers internal...