XNA Game Studio 3.0 released

Microsoft today released the XNA Game Studio.

New Features in the release:

• C# 3.0, LINQ support
• Community Games
• Zune Support

Also the installation contains a new starter kit, a platformer starter kit for all support platforms. (Windows PC, XBox 360, Zune)

The player looks like a film start… let me think a brown leather jacket, … and a brown hat, who could it be?

Oh a Indiana Jones character

But the good old Space War is gone …

Get the stuff while’s hot

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/xnags_islive

PDC 2008, Day 1

But something more happened today, beside my progress on my DX10 framework, the PDC 2008 started and Microsoft unveiled a lot of new stuff I will have to check out, but most importantly they released the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview as well.

The download weights 7353.3 MB so it takes a while to get it.
If you are interested in the CTP you can find the download here. The CTP is only available as a Virtual PC image.

Some more news from the PDC 2008 today:

• Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider
• Windows Azure Announced

There’s a lot more coming and it will be a very interesting day tomorrow as more and more will be unveiled and session will be posted on Channel9.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow when I finally get the chance to play with the CTP.

More color and depth

Today I made some progress.

The Shader code is now able to get and set shader variables, I added a new camera system and made the creation and the handling of vertex buffers and index buffers a lot more streamlined and easier to use.
You can see the result below:

First triangle, a green one

Today I finally got some time to work further on my new D3D10 game framework and it’s going along quit nicely. 

There’s not so much new in the visible space but I added some new features behind the scenes like a logging component, a starting point of a content loader and a Memory Leak Detector. But also some work on the Graphics part was done.
Shader compiling and loading is working.
The first triangle is drawn, so I’m happy and finished for today.

It’s CornflowerBlue again

I got my PC and now after I switched out the broken RAM it’s running great so I now can start working on my DirectX 10 based engine. It will be codename Jen3D.

I started working on the underlying framework, creating the win32 window, setting up a basic message loop and creating the Direct3D10 device.

And as the title says it’s CornflowerBlue again. The underlying framework is ready and can be used. As a longtime XNA-Framework user I had to choose CornflowerBlue as the default clear color

VS 2008 Environment Setup for FMod Ex

At first you have to download and install FMOD Ex Programmers API from http://www.fmod.org/index.php/download.

FMOD is free to use for free application. (have a look at the License)

After the installation is complete (can take some minutes) you can find everything you need in the directory.
The API comes in with support for 3 different languages c/c++, vb and c#.

This includes the API and the examples, sadly there’s only documentation for the C++ API but the API is easy and very equal in all supported languages.

Setting up the environment is a little bit tricky if you have just worked with C# in the last time. So I will document how to setup the environment so it’s ready to use.

• The fist step is to add the directory for the header files.

Begin by right-clicking on the project in the solution explorer and then click on properties(at the bottom).
The Properties Windows will show up, expand Configuration Properties and then choose the point C/C++ it will look like this.

Now type the complete path to the inc folder of the API in the field right of Additional Include Directories
For me the path is

“C:\Programme\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API Win32\api\inc”

I’m on a German OS because of that “Programme” is used instead of “Program Files”.

• Step two add the additional libraries folder

With the Property Window left open click on Linker:

In the field next  Additional Library Directories type in the path to the lib folder:

“C:\Programme\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API Win32\api\lib”

Now vs 2008 now where to look for additional libraries so we can add the library we need

• step three: add the library

Expand linker and click on Input:

Under additional dependencies we have to type the correct library since I want to use FMOD with all plugins compiled into the DLL. For visual studio use fmodex_vc.lib

To see what dll’s and libraries are available and when to use them have a look at the documentation.

• last step: copy the dll

The last step is simple just get the fmodex.dll from the API directory and copy it into the same folder as your executable.

Path of the .dll:

C:\Programme\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API Win32\api

Now we ready to use FMOD.
Have Fun.

New Territory

At the moment I work a lot with the XNA Framework and I love it. But it’s time to learn something new. This will be DirectX 10 and all the new stuff introduced with it, will be a lot of work and fun. But I’m actually running Windows XP and so I can not start working on it immediately. But my new PC is ordered and hopefully it will arrive soon.

Until then I will work on the first part of the small engine I’m going to work on, the sound component.

This component will be build on top of FMOD. FMOD is working on XP as well so I can get started with the work right now.

My next posts are kind of my personal notebook, but this time I will not write it down locally just as a reference for me, instead I will post those here on the blog so everybody can get some information’s and have a place to look something up if he got stuck.
Including me