David Weller's Continuing Musings on Gaming and Graphics

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!).

I've been following stuff from Scott Hanselman's blog for a long time (if you're a developer, especially if you do ASP.NET, subscribe to his blog).  Today, Scott tosses up a post about RockScroll, which, well rocks!  Check it out! (What does it do? Hint: Navigable thumbnail view of your source embedded in Visual Studio while you're editing)

For those that dig games that tie in to the ancient Japanese Shinto religion, or just like good storytelling, the Okami game is a fun and fascinating game that brought a new life to the PS2 console back in 2006, along with great reviews.

I was thrilled to see the same game become available for the Wii last month, and finally got around to buying it this week.  I was thrilled with the knowledge that the unique "brush stroke" concept would come to the vaunted Wiimote, and relished at the thought of vanquishing enemies with it, much in the same way that Ralphie did with his Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle.

Then reality hit.

I'm disappointed to say that the resulting experience actually detracts from the game, significantly.  While the gameplay essentially remains the same from the Original (in fact, I really couldn't tell the difference), the celestial brush feature was very jittery/noisy, leaving me far more frustrated with the experience than one should have with something as graceful as the Wiimote. 

While the game has scored well from some reviewers, my strongest advice is to find the (likely) cheaper PS2 version if you have a PS2 setup - some reviewers agree.  Otherwise, I still encourage you to get or rent Okami for the Wii -- in spite of the disappointment, it's still a great story and a very engaging game, provided you don't get frustrated with the Wii controls.

Ok, the FTC just published an interesting "secret shopper study" on how easy it is for kids to get their mitts on M-rated games.  Turns out it's easier for them to buy R-Rated movie tickets or rent R-rated/Unrated DVDs than it is to get M-Rated games....by a significant margin.

Next time you hear somebody blabbing about how easy it is for kids to get M-rated video games, show 'em the chart on the link above (I think I"m going to make a laminated, wallet-size one :-) ) 

Well, as you can see, the blog looks a little different (I moved to Graffiti CMS, a nice product from Telligent!).  I'll be fine-tuning it over the next few days, including getting the presentation fixed up.  If you're subscribed to my RSS feed, you shouldn't see any difference (crossing fingers!).  More to come later!

Well, the big announcement about the Game Studio 3.0 CTP went out an hour ago.  Everybody is excited about the built-in Zune support, and that's cool, but there's another feature that's in there that I think is more exciting than that.  It's called SoundEffect, and it lurks in your Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio library.

Why is it special?  Remember all that stuff you had to do with XACT to create the WavBank/SoundBank stuff just to get sounds loaded into the content pipeline? Try this instead:

1. Drop the WAV file into your Content area (let's say it's "shipexplode.wav" file)
2. Create a SoundEffect instance (i.e., "Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio.SoundEffect  spaceShipExplosion;")
3. Load the content:  "spaceShipExplosion = Content.Load<SoundEffect>("shipexplode.wav");"
4. In your update area (or wherever): "spaceShipExplosion.Play();"

What this means is that XACT would only be used for more advanced sound processing needs.  But for the majority of you, you will find the SoundEffects API is very satisfactory, and probably all you need.

ok, you can now find me making microblog comments via twitter (although not this explicit, I promise! [scatological content warning]) -- feel free to subscribe to the LetsKillDave twitter feed.  If you run WIndows Vista, you might want to look at Twadget, a free Twitter gadget for your sidebar.  If you want the whole mobile experience, try Tiny Twitter!  If you have XP or a Mac, try twhirl.

Now, about the "changes" part...this blog will be undergoing a transformation of sorts soon.  I'm sure many of you have noticed that my blog posts have tailed off considerably (and the content itself has admittedly been quite benign).  I'm going to take a few steps to distance this blog away from my current professional blog, although rest assured the topics will still be about gaming and game development!  Lately the problem has been that my blog posts have devolved into nothing more than bland echoing of things from Microsoft.  Not that those things are themselves bland (they aren't), it's just that I feel my blog has devolved into something of an echo chamber, making it no different than 99.99% of all the other blogs in the world.  For those of you that have known me and my writing style over the years, you know that being an "echo chamber" is not my bag.

Shawn Hargreaves always has interesting blog posts, and this recent one is no different.  He explains the model of how a CPU/GPU combination works by describing it as two elves that live in a box.  It's worth reading, trust me

Well, the Cyberathlete Professoinal League has ceased to exist.  I was one of the team contestants for the 1999/2000 tournament years.  The best we did was 16th place.  We were just a bunch of dedicated Counter-Strike players who got together on weekends and had LAN parties.  Pretty soon we discovered that we were demolishing other teams in the Texas region pretty handily, and found ourselves given an invite to a CPL regional (I think they were called "CAL" regionals...memory is fuzzy now :-).  Well, we kept winning and went on to "The Show" in Dallas.  It was amazing, because we saw PAID teams flown in from all over the world...South Africa, Finland, France, Japan, Korea....and they kicked our butts like we were in kindergarten.  Our only saving grace is that were were pretty good for just being a bunch of "Weekend Warriors", so we made enough prize money to pay for our entry fees and a couple of overpriced hot dogs.  We repeated it again in 2000, but by that time most of us didn't like the demands it put on ourselves or our families, and the 2000 tournament was our swan song.

Anyway...it was cool, fun, etc.  I made great friends there too.  But alas, no more. 

ok, back to gamer geek stuff.

Psst....Conquerator is a BLAST!

Just a quick blurb to let you hardcore devs know that the latest DX SDK is now available.  As always, the latest SDK can be found at http://msdn.com/directx/sdk