xgame: Hellish Heli

So I dug up the ol' gravitas solution and decided it was time to load a mesh in there. Coding4Fun again proved helpful. Unlike the very uninformative error messages from DirectX. With some playing about, I managed to get the sample heli.x to load and render in stark white.Then I had to turn on the lights. (device.RenderState.Lighting = true; device.RenderState.Ambient...

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picturesofwalls.com

Title says it all. Pictures of walls.Man some of these are funny.Great content, amusing presentation, and occasional irony. Nothing quite like the venting of profound, repressed, anonymous vanda...

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TeamPlain Opensearch

TeamPlain has a goto work-item search that opens up workitems, oddly enough. I wanted to use the Firefox search box to fire this off.Using the guide: Creating OpenSearch plug-ins for Firefox, I started putting together an XML OpenSearch description in notepad.Needing an icon, I Gimped out the logo from the TeamPlain site, took it past the data: URI...

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hp nx9420: Screen broken & fixed!

So my screen went on the blink; more like the scramble. It was very upsetting, and it carried on like this for a few weeks. I used an external monitor and sometimes the regular screen would work. It was very unpredictable and would break without any cause, which frustrated the hell out of me.Eventually while sitting in a friend's loungue I decided...

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My Coke Fest: Hoobastank

So, I went to the 'My Coke Fest' in Joburg. It was pretty cool. Hoobastank rocked ;) their lead singer looked like he couldn't have been more than 20; turns out the whole band is over 30 -- there's hope for us yet.The picture (left) is of Hoobastank, with their lead singer standing on his box -- he was so tiny. Apparently he's Incubus' brother,...

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Rocket Commander Tutorial Videos

Not only is Rocket Commander a pretty cool looking (but rather boring) MDX game with publicly available source, it turns out they've done a series of 10 30-minute video tutorials on the making of the game. Swe...

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xgame: Three-Dee space craft

So, I wanted to add substance to my craft. This was quite easy. I rearranged the points in the VertexBuffer into a list describing a triangle fan and fiddled to get that to work.pointList_VB = new VertexBuffer(typeof(CustomVertex.PositionColored), 12, device, Usage.Dynamic | Usage.WriteOnly, ...

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Player variables into player object

So, I had collected a lovely bunch of variables to track the position of the craft, looking something like this: (gotta love having your dev history in an SVN repo) private Vector3 p1rot; private Vector3 p1rotInput; private float p1rotForce; public Vector3 Player1Rotation { get { return p1rot; } ...

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xgame: "Real" time

So, I demoed my game on battery power.. and it sucked. Interestingly whenever windows showed a tooltip, the game ran at full pelt.. something fishy there. But anyway, I introduced a Δt (delta t for the unicode (or greek) unaware) into my calculations. The first stumbling block was that I was using the tick counter, which sucks a bit. The thing is, even though it has damn good accuracy, it is only updated every now and then. Which is a bit odd. I managed to hack it into working by doing the following: private void Physics() { while...

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xgame: WinForms, OnKeyDown -> DirectInput

I wanted to have my game panel run inside a splitter with a collapsible properties panel. This was quite easy to achieve, merely needing the changing of the handle that directX was pointing at. i.e. changing this:d3dDevice = new Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.Device(0, Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.DeviceType.Hardware, this, flags, d3dpp);to this:d3dDevice...

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xgame deliverable one

Update: I'm using MDX, Rein's using XNA and Colin has joined us using GL.My first deliverable was to have an object in a scene with tilt-to-steer and gravity.This is done.yay!The objectThe object is a triangle list primitive with a single triangle in it. Each vertex is differently coloured to help with orientation. It whizzes around quite satisfactorily...

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xgame begins

So, Rein and I decided to have a little compo. To learn DirectX and make something cool. The first thing I've been able to come up with is a remake of an old game that used to go by the name of 'VGA planets', not the VGA planets, mind you. With such a name, it's just not possible to find in amongst the birdmen and the borg ( I think they've assimilated the original). Spec: We have a bunch of planets which remain stationary, players' space ships which are fitted with inertial drives which can be turned off. A ship has fuel and a gun. The gun...

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C#: Using StringBuilder with operators

So, I had a plane trip ahead of me, and I wanted to be able to use .net StringBuilder with operators, below is the bstring class I wrote to do this. It's pretty straightforward, except the * operator behaves like python's and additionally is faster than a looped StringBuilder because of the pre-calculation (and allocation) of capacity. Still trivial, but it makes the StringBuilder useful without having to remember its syntax.In testing it (obviously) beat the string class and also was indistinguishable from the StringBuilder in all but the *...

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