What's up with me...and a tidbit about Visual Studio...
Friday, June 20 2008 - 2 comments
Well, some logistical delays prevent me from leaving Washington and heading to Texas until July 8th. Basically, a one week delay in early June threw us right into the July 4th holiday rush season, and if we had tried to have our stuff packed/moved, we'd have paid a high premium. Sooo...we decided to wait until after the 4th of July holiday to head to Texas . On the bighter side, that gave me a little time to tinker away at some technical stuff. One thing I've never sharedis my own slightly quirky settings for Visual Studio. There's tons of color schemes and fonts out there, and you can really get lost in that stuff (and wind up not doing your real work :-). You can find several places that talk about color schemes, starting with Scott Henselman's cool overview of VS themes. I personally had two goals in mind when I picked my theme:
- The theme had to have good contrast between different logical parts (comments, string text, and code)
- The theme shouldn't differ too much from the default VS setup. If I needed to work on a system that didn't have my settings, I didn't want the differences to be so severe that it was visually distracting.
I settled with a variation of Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood's theme, with some small variations and one big one -- the use of the Envy Code R monospaced font (kudos to Damien Guard for putting in the effort to make that font). The nice thing isthat his font uses italics instead of bold, giving a little more visual consistency from my perspective. Here's a simple screen cap to give you an idea. EDIT: Almost forgot to link to the theme so you can import it in VS 2008 -- here you go!
More to come later!
June 2008 DirectX SDK now available...
Saturday, June 07 2008 - 1 comments
I decided to take a little time off from grouting my shower and repainting my house to let you all know that the new June 2008 DirectX SDK is available for download here. I'm not sure who the new Microsoft DirectX and XNA community manager is, but he/she needs to get on the ball and keep people informed of new downloads and news, I can't keep doing this for them :-)
Some thoughts on learning XNA game development...
Tuesday, May 27 2008 - 0 comments
A recent thread on the XNA forums titled "Where does one have to go to major in game development?" reminded me of a recent blog I discovered, written by Josh "Scientific Ninja" Petrie. Some of you may recognize his name from the work he does on SlimDX, but what is REALLY interesting about Josh is his great blog posts that give various bits of advice about the game industry. Take his most recent one on development tools, where he says:
"When it comes to tools in particular, reasoning behind the argument tends to be one of
- you’re considering a career in the industry and want to learn the “correct” tools, or
- you want to use “the tools” that professionals use because you believe it will give what you produce with those tools an edge over what you might produce with some other tool.
Both of these are bad reasons."
He goes on to outline the reasons, all of them good. I would also add that the single best thing you can do as you learn to be a game developer is to take small steps. Seriously, don't get bogged down in doing big things. Make a small thing and make it bigger in small steps (this also has the side benefit that you feel more comfortable going back and fine-tuning parts of the game). It worked for John Carmack, I guarantee it will work for you :-)
P.S. - Check out Josh's del.icio.us tags...great reading in there!
Leaving Microsoft....
Tuesday, May 27 2008 - 47 comments
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” -- Woody Allen
Family issues have come up in my home state of Texas that require my immediate, long-term attention. An unfortunate, if not inevitable, ripple-effect from my father's passing a couple of years ago. I've been frantically packing my house starting this weekend, because I need to be in Texas in a couple of weeks to pack up another one. The next couple of months will be...interesting.
What does this mean for me? Well, obviously I won't be Mr "Inside XNA" anymore, I'll be just like you, writing games for the Xbox LIVE Community Game service in preparation for the RTM of the service. I'll still hang out in the XNA forums as well (plus some more time on Gamedev.Net), but moving and selling two homes (mine and my mom's) will keep me pretty busy for the next month or two. On the other hand, what free time I have will be spent doing what I love the most: writing!
For those that have followed my blog all these years, please accept my apologies for the abruptness of the announcement -- although if you've been monitoring my twitters over the last week, this blog post shouldn't come as much of a surprise. But don't worry too much, as I still fully intend to continue offering insights and commentary on XNA and game development.
I'll blog more about my happenings as time goes along, for now though, I have a house to pack (and now I wish I'd spent more time at the gym!)
P.S. -- If you want to hear more about the new XNA Community Games stuff, be sure to check out my final podcast interview (at least as a Microsoft employee), recorded last week, with Major Nelson and Dax Hawkins.
Use your wee controller...
Monday, May 19 2008 - 1 comments
Ok, that's a novel way to control video games...
WiX now supports Windows Vista game setup
Monday, May 19 2008 - 3 comments
Big thanks to Richard Thomson (DirectX MVP) for pointing out the blog post that WiX now has gaming extensions to help you install games to Windows Vista and XP. If you're targeting the PC with your XNA Game Studio development, WiX is a great (almost necessary) tool to learn!
A Game State Manager Menu Designer!
Wednesday, May 14 2008 - 0 comments
Stephen Styrchak (BadCorporateLogo) wasn't content to enjoy Nazeeh's cool Game State Management template. Nope, he had to show off his Visual Studio wizardry at extending Nazeeh's work. The end result? You get something amazing!
Game State Manager implemented for the Zune now...
Monday, May 12 2008 - 0 comments
Looks like Glenn "Mykre" Wilson got bored this weekend and decided to port the Game State Manager to the Zune (the XNA MVPs are chronic overachievers :-). Check out his post about how he adapted it for the Zune. If you want something a little "different", Zuneblade seems to hold some promise, although it's not available to use yet (although the author says it will be available "very soon".
Setting the record straight on Visual Studio 2008 and Game Studio...
Sunday, May 11 2008 - 0 comments
Stephen "Righteous Tool" Styrchak has a great blog called "BadCorporateLogo". Stephen writes about all sorts of things related to the nuances of XNA Game Studio development using VIsual Studio. In a post he made on Friday, Stephen opens up the kimono and gives you all the details about why VS2008 and GS 2.0 didn't get integrated. It's a great read, giving you some insight into the inner workings of the XNA Game Studio team as well.
Broken RSS feed -- fixed now!
Sunday, May 11 2008 - 0 comments
Due to a current bug in Graffiti CMS (which I still really like!), I've had to make blog posts in a "Blog" category, rather than uncategorized as I traditionally have. I'll be fixing this shortly, but in the meantime (thanks to my buddy in France, Pierre "LeResistant" Thurau, who spotted this) I've corrected my Feedburner feed to put everything back in my order(Feedburner rox!).
