XNA Essentials

Game Programming for Xbox 360, PC + Windows Phone

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Carolina Code Camp – 10/10/09

If you are within driving distance of Charlotte, North Carolina you should really take the time to come to the code camp this Saturday, October 10th, 2009. There are going to be many excellent sessions.

I’ll be speaking during two time slots, but it is unclear at this time if it will be the same Hands on Lab in both, or one Hands on Lab and one lecture type session. Regardless, having an entire track for XNA is pretty cool.

The theme for the code camp is Developing for Dollars. – Learn. Develop. Sell.

That’s a pretty catchy theme in times like these.

The event (as with all Code Camps) is free and there are plenty of things to learn so get to Charlotte this Saturday.

When: Saturday, October 10, 2009 8AM – 5PM (Registration opens at 7AM)

Where: CPCC Levine Campus, 2800 Campus Ridge Rd, Matthews, NC 28105

Cost: Free!

http://codecamp.developersguild.org/

So head over to the CPCC campus on Saturday to learn and network!

Happy Networking and Learning!

-Chad

Raleigh Code Camp 2009 – 9/19/09

If you are within driving distance of Raleigh, North Carolina you should really take the time to come to the code camp this Saturday, September 19th, 2009. There will be some excellent sessions like:

  • Building Composite Applications with Silverlight 3 and Prism
  • Unit Testing with NUnit and Watin
  • Lucene: Search We Can Believe In!
  • ASP.NET 4.0
  • jQuery from the Ground Up
  • Measuring and Improving the Performance of your .NET Applications
  • Get Rich with UX in Silverlight
  • Implementing ADO.NET Data Services
  • Making Money by Making Games with XNA [by yours truly]
  • Ignite Your ASP.NET MVC Project with Spark View Engine
  • Dynamic Language Performance
  • Parameterized Unit Testing with Pex : Automated White Box Testing for .NET
  • Blend for Developers
  • Bootstrapping for Fun and (Hopefully) Profit
  • Beginning Windows Mobile Development
  • PHP on Windows
  • SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services for .NET Developers
  • NIS Re-engineering of the Data Framework via Object Relational Mapping tools with Domain Driven Design Methods [Say that 3 times fast!]
  • Building Business Applications in Silverlight 3
  • Bigger, Stronger, Faster – Making Quality .NET Applications Fast and Bug Free
  • Database Design for Developers
  • Building a Blog with ASP.NET MVC
  • Ruby for C# / .NET Developers
  • Introduction to the AutoCAD API
  • Building Composite WPF Applications
  • SOLID
  • SQL Injection
  • The Ins and Outs of CloudDB
  • Visualizing Change using TFS 2020
  • Team Documentation with OneNote
  • Templating and Data Binding in Expression Blend
  • Practical Test Driven Development with Visual Studio Team System
  • MVC and the Repository Pattern
  • Developing WPF Applications with Prism
  • Delegates, Lambdas, and Expressions (Oh My!)

 

Besides all of those sessions (plus at least one more that hasn’t been announced), there are also giveaways.  Who doesn’t love free stuff?

So there are plenty of opportunities to learn new things and to see if there is something you would like to spend more time doing.

Also, I may devote some of the time of my talk on the new Zune HD assuming someone has one at the code camp. Mine won’t arrive until next week it seems.

The event is free and there are plenty of things to learn, so don’t let this opportunity pass you by – get to Raleigh this Saturday.

When: Saturday September 19, 2009 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Where: ECPI - 4101 Doie Cope Rd Raleigh, NC 27613 [Bing it!]
How much? $0 – as in free, nada, zip, zilch, zero.

http://www.codecamp.org/

 

And as a heads up … on October 10th, Charlotte, NC will be having a Mega Code Camp. I’ll put up a post about it as the date draws closer, but mark your calendars now for that event. I hear there will be a lot of labs to really get hands on with  the sessions.

Happy Learning!

-Chad

GameFest 2008

I enjoyed GameFest this year, but there seemed to be a lot more excitement last year.  It may have just been that there were so many announcements last year and the entire DBP finalist and winners.

The big news announced was the fact that Microsoft is 'allowing' game creators to sell their games on Xbox LIVE Marketplace.  I used quotes because if you want your game on Marketplace - it has to be sold.  You will not be able to give your game away.

So at this point you can sell your game for either 200 points (about $2.50), 400 points (about $5.00) or 800 points (about $10.00).  Microsoft takes at least 30% of the sales.  Making 70% on a product in this type of distribution model is excellent.  Additional fees (yet to be determined) will be deducted for transactions and similar things.  If Microsoft puts your game on the 'Featured' page in the Marketplace then they will take an additional 10-30%.  There is no details at this point regarding how games will be picked for this list.  It will be based on some heuristics, but they are still flushing that out.

It is up to the developer as to which tier they want to sell their game in.  There is one exception to this.  If the game is over 50MB (compressed) then it cannot be sold for the lowest tier (200 points).  It must be sold in the middle or high tiers.  It is no problem for a game that is under 50MB to sell for more than 200 points.  The maximum size a game can be (compressed) is 150MB.

Microsoft announced a new dashboard look and feel a couple of weeks ago during E3.  This new look is to try and help with the enormous amount of content in the marketplace.  Because of this new dashboard, when a game is created a new requirement is to also create 'Box Art', which is basically what it says.  If your game was shipping in a box, what would the front cover of the box look like?  There may be a requirement (will definitely be an option) to provide more information like 'Slideshows' which also fall in line with the dash's new look and feel.

I listened to a talk from Frank Savage, who has a new title of Architect.  Frank's talk discussed a few things, but he mentioned 'Frank's 3rd Law' which states:

Optimize because you must not because you can!

So this falls right in line with the whole premise of performance that I go by.  You have to measure.  By measuring you can determine if your game (or application) is performing well enough to meet the goals of the project.  So measure, measure, measure.  Make notes on some code that may be a problem area if frame rates start to suffer, but don't just dive in and really optimize that code until there is actually a problem.  Spend that time writing better game play, or AI or Physics or anything else that is needed for your game.

Shawn Hargreaves had two talks.  One was regarding the Content Pipeline (Eli Tayrien also had a talk on the Content Pipeline) and the other was on Networking.  As expected, both of Shawn's were very good.  In the Content Pipeline talk, I learned about Opaque data which is data you can set in the modeling program that your Content Pipeline can read in and do something with it.  For example, let's say you build out an entire 3D level in Maya or 3D Studio Max.  You can put place holders in the level for Triggers for example.  Those meshes can be assigned Opaque Data that the Content Pipeline can look for.  When it finds a mesh that has that Opaque Data custom processing can be done.  For the trigger, the code may remove the actual dummy mesh that was used and create a custom trigger that your game can understand.  I used this method about 10 years ago when I worked on a train simulator.  I didn't have a nice content pipeline to strip it out and had to do it at run time.

His networking talk was phenomenal.  Between this talk and a few from the XBOX LIVE track that I attended I learned that the goal for a game is to not send any more than 8kb of data per second.  It is extremely bad to send network data at the same rate as your frame rate.  Sending 60 packets a second is not a good thing.  In another talk they mentioned 15-20 packets per second was good.  Something that may not be immediately obvious is the fact that 8kb is not just game data.  It also includes the Xbox LIVE header information for the VDP packets (UDP with some encryption specific to Xbox LIVE).  It also includes all the voice data.  So if you have 16 players in a game and they all talk at the same time the 8kb is used up.  While this is acceptable in the Lobby, it isn't during the game play as no game play data will be sent.  So it is a good idea to limit who all hears each other.  Some ways to limit this is by proximity in the game world.  Only the players 'physically' close to each other can hear each other chat.  For some games, perhaps a way to accomplish this is by only allowing teammates to chat.  It was also mentioned that latency (the amount of time it takes for the player to actually receive the packet) is about 500 milliseconds (.5 seconds).  This is pretty significant.  So network prediction is really required.  This involves passing enough information to take an educated guess of where the object will be by the next time the next packet arrives.  A good example of this is on the creators club site in the Network Prediction sample.

Mitch Walker had a couple of talks as well.  I ended up writing the most with his talks as he had a lot of bullets in his power points.  He had a talk discussing what is new in 3.0.  The second talk was about creating great community games.  Both were very good.  I enjoyed going to all of the XNA Game Studio sessions.  The sessions were repeated the second day so I was able to hit a couple of other tracks.  Well, I went to one other track beside the Xbox LIVE track.  I attended two Casual Game sessions.  Both discussed Silverlight.  I enjoy working with Silverlight and was excited to see it being talked about.

Overall it was a very enjoyable conference.  I had a good time and learned some new things.  I met a couple of new people as well, so that is always good.

Good things are coming with XNA GS 3.0...

Happy Coding!

-Chad