A New Love Affair – UML and Me and Some Aussies.

You probably don’t know this, I’m an Aussie. My American wife tells me Americans see us as tough, rugged, no nonsense people. I’m good with that perception, stick with it if you’re American, we’ll do our best to stick up to our end of the bargain by being tough, rugged straight shooters. K?

There’s more to it though. I have found a terrific package from Oz that makes me especially proud: Enterprise Architect 6.5 by Sparx Systems. Thanks to Fluxtah on #XNA on Efnet for the link to this little gem.

I don’t usually plug software that’s commercial in nature. Sure, I use and enjoy using plenty of commercial apps, but I figure thats their marketing departments problem. Today, I’m making an exception, I need a tool like this, and I need it to be as cheap and good as this one. I used to use XDE for C# in VS 2003. Upgrading for 2003 would cost more than this, and that only worked for one language and technology – not to mention I wouldnt be able to use VS express, I’d have to upgrate VS 2003 too.

My day job is that of an architect, and we work with Actionscript a lot. It supports Actionscript, it will even reverse engineer it and keep synchronised. Wow.

If I continue to love it, and buy it, I’ll do a full review.

Here’s a sample of a quick diagram I threw together to explain Animator2D. Click it to see it full size (well, as large as wordpress allows).

Game Services and Game Components

I’ve been wondering for some time how the GameComponent is meant to be used in a way that’s of any real use. I’m not sure how he/she worked it out, but nuclex described the GameService and GameComponent very well in this article.

It much clearer than “ms-help://MS.VSExpressCC.v80/MS.VSIPCC.v80/MS.XNAFX.1033/XNA/AppModel_GameLoop.htm” (link requires XNA GSE and IE)

Carpal Tunnel Logo

I worked about 3 hours on this, which is a bit long, but I’m quite scratchy. Being quite fiddly with a mouse, my hand is now aching. Silly thing is, in a cupboard around here some place is a wacom.

CLICK the image to see it in its high definition glory!

The pixel art plugin for flash is how I usually achieve ISO pixel art. Unfortunately, I don’t have a currently licensed copy of Flash at home and I exhausted the trial, so I used MS Paint.

I think it needs more going on, like a little mascot or something… Any thoughts on a mascot?  I would do a space invader either side but who knows what the legal issues are.

Another Variant [Update]

Diferent shading, mor consistant light source.

Xanadu WIP

Some of my work on my scroller. Very early days but I’d like to show it off a little.

Get it from FileFront (opens in new window)

Some notes:

• One silly level that just ends up trailing to nothing.
• No Shooting.
• A stationary enemy that you can fly through.
• No collision detection
• You must meet all the XNA requirements, I believe that microsoft have a redistributable package someplace – I will link it when it isn’t sunday night and time for bed
• It’s got a dodgy system for working out aspect ratio. On my laptop which is 1680×1050 it definitely looks a bit silly – the starfield and the bounds for the fighter are smaller than the screen.

Keys:

A/S/D/W for left/down/right/up

V for the “A” button to start (yes the intro screen is thinking in terms of an XBox 360)

ALT-Enter will make it fullscreen.

ALT-F4 will exit.

Thanks to the #XNA and #Gamedev channels on Efnet for their assistance to date!

Dude.. Too Easy

A community announcement for those people suffering from “Dr-Rambo-The-Tough-Guy” syndrome. The cure is simple, take one of these before bed:

Animator2D on Codeplex

Got the site today so all my dev on this rather simple library will be over at: http://www.codeplex.com/Animator2D

If you use it, do drop me a line to let me know!

Animator2D Ultra-Pre-Alpha release!

Here is something I have been working on. If you like it and work with it (especially if you create behaviours) then please drop a comment with a link to patches. There’s still much to do, especially temporal easing/scaling.

It appears at first to do very little, but you’ll note that position and heading vectors provide a lot you can animate against. E.G. 

• The size of your mob engine flames based on vector.length
• Orientation of your mobs based on Atan(vector.X,vector.Y)
• On screen position of course

Grab the source from File Front

It LGPL so don’t be afraid to use it in your games.

More updates soon, and hopefully a codeplex project for it. 

First Screenshot

Not even remotely playable yet…

What’s planned to make something playable:

• Ship Model that can attach various weapons
• Ship Model that isn’t ugly.
• Better artwork for background
• Better background tilemap (writing an .fmp importer for this)
• Some Hud to keep score
• Simple enemy models
• Simple enemy behaviour.
• Simple powerups left behind by enemies

Thats it, nothing fancy, no destructables, no bosses, 1 level. I hope to get there within a month. 

Run away

As a possible solution to honkykong’s question about averaging angles from mobs.

If the faded mobs in the picture are assigned a badness value and are a specific angle from you (as they always are) then you can obtain a vector for each of them, where badness is the magnitude.

For all baddies, add the vectors, and that’s the way to go if you want a hope of escaping. My diagram is back to front

I don’t know know what happens as this system becomes dynamic, how often you need to check this graph to get worthwhile results, or if the whole thing will work at all. Maybe honkeykong will let me know.

I’m No Artist

 Seriously… Don’t believe me?

What dya say to that spaceship?! I especially like the clothes-iron handle. See i modelled it in a 3d app (Wings3D) and got to see it from all angles. I did not focus on the angle most common in my game tho.

See looks slightly better there right? No? Oh well…

If you have a groovy spaceship you wanna lend me to test in my scroller i’d freaking love it!