XNA Essentials

XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed Code updated to Run under Windows 10 (and HoloLens)

I’ve gone through the first pass of updating the code in the book. This took quite a bit of time. Some of the chapters are still a little wonky as I’ve ran out of time. But I wanted to get what I have done out into the public in case it was beneficial to anyone. I never really thought I’d update the code for the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed book. There were a lot of breaking changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0 and I just didn’t have the time to do it.

However, with my HoloLens being ordered, and hearing Tom Spilman on .NET Rocks last week (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1283), I decided to see what it would take to upgrade. It was surprisingly simple to get quite a few chapters converted and upgraded. Other chapters were just not attempted (like Networking stuff that isn’t directly in MonoGame [they expect you to use other libraries]). Others had to be commented out to work (like the GameServices stuff to bring up the Xbox Guide, etc.)

Still, the overall conversion project was a success. There a couple of rough edges, but now anyone can fork it and do what they'd like with it. Feel free to send a pull request, if you smooth out a rough edge. Try to keep with the original intent with the code as much as possible.

Go ahead and grab the code from GitHub:

https://github.com/kewlniss/XNAUnleashed

The Table of Contents for the book this code goes with can be found at http://xnaessentials.com/unleashed

I’m pleased to announce that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed book’s source code has been released under the Ms-PL license on CodePlex.

So you can use Git and create a clone locally to start working with it or you can fork it and update it for XNA 4.0.

Have fun with it!

-Chad

I’ll be blogging about the SIEGE Conference on my personal blog soon, but I did want to at least put up my PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave this past Saturday. I received a lot of good feedback. It was a challenge getting to demo the 360 since it has to be connected to the internet. Overcoming Hotel WiFi restrictions is always fun.

In general, this conference was really good. I had a great time networking and talking to folks. I met a professor and some of his students who are using my book in their class this year. That was really cool. Also meeting the co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell and chatting with him was pretty awesome. If you are interested in any of that, make sure you check out my personal blog where I put non XNA related content.

Feel free to download the presentation slides.

I did a talk yesterday at the Raleigh Code Camp. It went well I think. If anyone was at the talk and would like to give me feedback, feel free. The only way I’ll get better is if I know how effective / non effective the talk was.

It is always interesting trying to give a talk to an audience with people who have no clue what XNA is as well as those who have been fooling with it for a year or more. Ultimately, there are parts where both parties are bored – but hopefully not at the same time!

Anyway, while the talk was more about best practices for XBLIG and what you need to do to submit games to ultimately make money using XNA, we did spend the last 10-15 minutes of the session looking at a scribble app I made for the Zune HD on Friday night before the session.

Rob Zelt mentioned on twitter that I may have very well been the first person to do an XNA talk with a demo for the Zune HD at a Code Camp. Seeing how the Zune HD was just released this past week and typically Code Camps are held on Saturdays and I had the second session of the day at 9:40 EST I think he may be right. For some reason that makes me smile. A geeky gold star for me.

OK, now to the actual project. You can download the project and look at the comments to see what it is doing. I also did a brief video on it Friday night after I got it working.

At a high level, the code is simply looking at the touch panel collection to see all of the points / vector2 that were moved. It grabs the starting and ending point for this move and adds it to a list. We then draw a line from the starting point to the ending point and do that for each line segment in our line list. To erase it, we just shake the device. Really, we are just checking the difference of the acceleration on the X or Y axis to see if it has moved a certain amount in a frame. This way if someone just moves it slowly or turns it the screen won’t erase, but if it is a fast enough motion (easily produced by shaking) then we clear the line list so there is nothing to draw. The demo code also collects the rotation of the device from the accelerometer as well as the acceleration, but doesn’t actually use the rotation values.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of what is needed, but you should definitely check out the documentation from XNA Game Studio. In order to run this, you will need a Zune HD as well as the latest XNA Framework which comes in XNA Game Studio 3.1 Zune Extensions.

Download Zune HD Scribble Test

Happy Coding!

-Chad

The publisher is allowing the entire contents on the CD that are included in the book to be purchased. This option is available to people who that purchased the Kindle version of the book. For Safari subscribers, the code can be downloaded via Safari. The code can be found on the downloads page.

-Chad

I am pleased to announce that the code for the book has been updated and is now available for download.  The files can be located at http://xnaessentials.com/downloads.aspx

As always, questions about the book, or the updated code can be directed to this book's forum located at amazon.com.

Happy Coding!

-Chad