oop

I just finished watching the intro video for oop and I have to say I'm very excited. Looks like we are going to learn some cool stuff.

Getting side tracked

I haven't done much coding lately I got side track by elder scroll oblivion 4. I know its been out for awhile but I just got around to getting it installed. I playing through the thief missions currently I think I'm near the end I just got the broken arrow back to Grey Fox. I closed two gates, kill the gray prince in the arena and got accepted into the mages academy with almost no magic. I loving the game but there have a few bugs I've encountered and one thing that seem odd to me but may not be a bug. Items that I sold to the fence that I took off the bodies of things I killed get counted as part of the stolen item fenced total that is need to advance to a higher rank in the thief guild. So my total grew quite large very quickly. The only thing I find lacking content wise is your interaction to characters in the game you have no real way of deciding what to say to a character other than to refuse to take a quest or not.

As for coding all have done is some knowledge reviews. New content was supposed to have gone up last night but they are having trouble with the file server so I have a few more hours in oblivion.

Well I think I'm pretty much done with my cannon 3

Ya I am happy with what I was able to do in such a small time. Cannon 3 now supports two players, multiple textures for the paratrooper for added variety, a cloud that move left to right and an animated tanks.

part2

Canno3 in action

New wacom has arrived

I spent the day making sprites and backgrounds. My old 4X6 tablet broke on me so I purchased a used 9X11 on eBay.

Code running on the Xbox 360 in less than 5 minutes

I decided to move cannon 3 over to the xbox 360 and I'm amazed at how little code needed to be change. Actually no code need to be change, all that really needed coding was to add the game pad input and like title says it took less then five minutes. On the other hand setting up the 360 to connect to the computer took about 45 minutes to hour. Microsoft needs to use a better font on the code to sync up your computer area because I couldn't tell a one, l and i apart but once the syncing is done it shouldn't have to be done again which is fine by me.

Cannon3- third times the charm

Cannon3 is the third time we programmed the same game but each time we did it was to move the class closer to working in XNA.

Cannon1 was an event driven visual C# game. The player was moved by the apps mousemove event. The projectile reset by the onclick event .




Cannon 2 was still a visual C# game but this time it was programed more like an xna game with separate update and draw methods and classes for game items and huditems.



Cannon 3 was our first step into xna. Most of the code, except the draw method, was simply copied from cannon 2 making it very quick and easy to code. Now when it was done it looked just like Cannon 2 but everyone wanted to add their own functionality to the game. I add sound effects, multiple targets and bullets, and a plane that flew across the screen dropping out targets based on time and the current limit of targets on screen.



I did this just by using the help files and when ever I had a problem I couldn't work out somebody usually was on the same sort of stuff and was willing to give a hand. The hardest part of my cannon3 game was trying to figure out how to compare all the items in ListA to all the items in ListB to use for collision detection. I had couldn't find anything in the help files and even Google came out empty for me. I had to draw out a picture of what I wanted the code to do to figure it out. And when it worked I was ecstatic . Check it out.



foreach (Bullets bullet in projectiles)
{
for (int i = targets.Count - 1; i > -1; i--)
{
if (Distance(bullet.Position, targets[i].Position+targets[i].Origin )<>
{
bullet.Alive = false;
targets.RemoveAt(i);
}
}
}


I don't know if this is the is the easiest way but it works.

The 9 class HelloWorld app called Hyperion

I thought I should go over the start of this class before getting into anything new. So you know how every programing book or website starts out with same simple somewhat boring console line app that prints out something like "HelloWorld" to the screen well that is not the Hyperion Project. Buzz calls this his HelloWorld app but it a full console text game that has 9 classes and a struct for good measure. Buzz wanted all of us, who were new to programing, just follow along and promised it would all start to make sense. And you know what for the most part it did. Now I'm not going to say that there weren't things that totally baffled me like the whole get set properties thing, but it did what it was supposed to do. It got me used to the c# syntax, the c# express IDE and creative process of designing before you start hacking away at code. It made getting into the basics fun. Now for that get set properties problem I was have trouble understanding the answer came to me in a dream.Yes a dream. I had gone to bed after trying to wrap my head around the need for the get set method. I couldn't understand why they were needed but as I was dreaming about the code I heard Buzz say the word "encapsulation". Just the one word and I still don't now what it means but something just snapped in place I just understood why you wouldn't want to make all properties public. Some how my mind came up with the idea of the distance a car could travel and the properties that affect it like amount of gas, gas mileage, tire pressure, road condition etc. Now what I had come up with was that the car's distance could never be less the zero so you would have to make a check in ever piece of code that affected it which be a lot of extra coding and with it the more of chance for an error in the code. So what if you had just one place in code to make the check to see if something is going to make the distance less than zero? That is the reason for the get set so you can put one simple check in before changing the value. Now Hyperion was fun to code and I learn a great deal from it and when I have a chance to go back to it I think I will learn much more.

New blog testing the water

This blog was basically a spur of the moment kind of thing, to document my progress in an XNA class I'm taking a 3dbuzz. I hope to keep it active but who knows. We are currently just finish up with week one, which took about three weeks because there was so much content to get through, 68 videos and counting. I will be posting pictures of the game I create and links to download them but most likely not any source code .