For anyone that is interested in communicating with other XNA game developers, I have created a forum over at ProBoards.

Feel free to post your thoughts or share game ideas.  I hope that this forum will aid future game developers.

I have been working on fixing my raycasting engine to be more generic.  Finally after solving a bug (that was caused by a missing bracket! - arrrgh), I have come up with a method to implement a generic raycaster.  What this will allow me to do is quite simple.

• Trace rays to find out if it hits a wall (can be used for drawing)
• Trace a ray to perform collision detection
• Tracing rays for AI and path finding

I am quite excited to have this working, and now I can continue on with the project.  In a near future updated, I have a friend of mine doing some artwork.  I will be putting in sprites this week (enemies and items in the world).  Keep coming back for more updates.

Can you believe it?  The XNA Team has announced they will be releasing a second beta version of XNA!! I can't wait!  You can find out more information here.

Well it's been a while since I have visited my own site.  I started a new job as a programming consultant on Monday (Oct. 16).  As a result, my personal projects have been suffering.  But, I intend to devote as much time to my projects as I possibly can.  I am continuing work on my raycasting engine and hope to have some more work done this week.  Some future updates will possibly include:

• Better collision detecting
• Floor and ceiling
• Sprites
• HUD

I have been playing with the Game Component side of XNA and I must say that it offers a great many possibilities.  I would like to try and make a Physics component that could be dropped in and used in a variety of games.  It won't be nearly as detailed as the Farseer Physics engine, found here.

My next BLOG will come when I have some more news to report.  Until then, ...

What I have been learning about XNA I have been putting to good use.  Today I finally finished the first installment of my raycasting engine.  It uses the Woflenstein techniques that are described in great detail in many places on the web.  The engine has some interesting features.

• Texture mapped walls
• Orthogonal walls only for the world
• Player can move around with the XBOX 360 gamepad

Some of the interesting features that I was able to discover was the ability to directly manipulate the surfaces.  I did all my drawing directly onto the surface using the good ol' DOS techniques.  Because a surface is derived from a Texture2D object, I could then draw the texture onto the screen.  There are some pretty interesting ideas that I am willing to entertain with this new knowledge.  I will be posting more as I work more and more on my engine.

Success!!

Last night I quickly wrote a program to test the gamepad functionality.  Surprisingly, it was very easy.  Testing the thumb stick locations, and the button statuses was intuitive.  I can't wait to start using my new gamepad with my new games!  I uploaded another album showing some of the screen from my gamepad test program.  The left thumbstick controls the blue squares location, while the right thumbstick controls its rotation.  Whenever a button is pressed down, an image with corresponding to the buttons colour is displayed in the top right corner of the screen.

Recently I have been playing around with Microsoft's XNA framework for C#.  It truly is a clean and very easy approach to making games.  I have been working on my first game called Blaster Bot which is really a technology experiment.  I want to see how easy it would be to make games with XNA.  I recently purchased a XBOX 360 controller for my PC. 

Right now, the game has the following:

• 2D horizontal shooter
• Enemies with simplistic AI
• 2 weapon types (rockets and lasers)
• A fully working particle engine
• Sounds for the weapons and explosions
• Font to display score
• A title screen

I am continuosly updating the game, and when finished I will post the code on the site.  I will continuously play with the XNA framework.  Now that I have a controller, I will be creating some test projects to understand how it all works.