Skipping a D

We see in 3, but 4 is more! The making of a 4D game using XNA Game Studio.
18 comments
14 entries
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JPatrick
December 29, 2009
New Years Resolution
Unfortunately, it appears as if DBP10 is dramatically sooner than I thought it would be. There's no way I'll be able to get anything ready by march, and I don't relish the prospect of waiting another year.

Perhaps it's an opportunity though. I'm growing increasingly fond of SlimDX, and would enjoy n…
884 views
JPatrick
November 24, 2009
New Approach
I suppose taking a break from the editor actually did some good afterall. I was constantly dreading working on it, and putting it off to do other things. Recently, however, I sat down and really thought about why that is. The main reason I suppose is obvious and hardly unique to me: GUI programming…
884 views
JPatrick
October 29, 2009
Crazy Corruption
Everything was going pretty smoothly. The emulator core was wrapped up in a nice managed interface, the WPF UI was hosting a winforms control that could be rendered to via SlimDX, xaudio2 output via SlimDX, etc. All the pieces were falling into place... except for the occasional startup crash. I wa…
813 views
JPatrick
September 30, 2009
Reacquainted with an old friend (enemy?)
Disappointed after my XNA module player idea went bust, I was itching for another side project to change things up and keep from getting burned out working on the same thing constantly. Most of the other ideas I had, while simpler than a 4D game to be sure, were full fledged projects in their own r…
855 views
JPatrick
August 31, 2009
*Crickets*
Since it's been over a month without a post, I feel compelled to make one, even if just to make sure there's an entry for august. The wheels are still turning, albeit slowly. Another heatwave a while back sapped my motivation, and more recently I've been tempted by other, much simpler, projects. I'…
856 views
JPatrick
July 13, 2009
Sounds Like a Hack
While the side project is shelved for now, I did discover something interesting that might be useful to other XNA users working with sound. XNA 3.0 added the SoundEffect API to bypass the complexity of XACT. Unfortunately, the sounds must still be authored ahead of time and can only be instantiated…
1,063 views
JPatrick
June 29, 2009
Undo/Redo and Debug Anecdote
Oddly enough, undo/redo was actually rather easy to implement. WPF's routed command facility makes it a snap to wire the shortcuts and add the callbacks. The implementation is simply two stacks of an IUndoRedo interface. New actions are pushed onto the Undo stack, and the Redo stack is cleared. If …
765 views
JPatrick
June 18, 2009
Success! Now I can... Wait, what was I doing again
It's embarrassing that it took a month to finish just this one control, but I think I can finally put it to rest and move on. It helps to remind myself that this control could be useful in any future WPF app I ever make. Out of the box it can edit any class that provides a string converter, flags a…
787 views
JPatrick
June 05, 2009
Bleh
Anyone in the Seattle area right now is I'm sure aware of the loathsome heatwave taking place. 90 plus degree temperatures in an area where it's not uncommon to have no AC at all does not foster motivation. I'm not a big fan of the day star to begin with, and record breaking heat is doing little to…
813 views
JPatrick
May 20, 2009
Editor Braindump
Almost a week since last update, So I thought I'd just talk a bit about the editor.

For some reason, writing one feels kind of like how doing homework felt. Well, minus the procrastination anxiety. It definitely has that fatiguing tedium of a project that you just want to put behind you so you can g…
898 views
JPatrick
May 14, 2009
Multi-Threading FTW: Part 2
Previously on Skipping a D:
Quote:First, before we can improve performance, we have to know where we stand. - ...we then have a full 24,000 intersection checks. - That's a LOT of computation, especially on the 360. - 25 tesseracts. Release build. No debugger. - It was time to use... (zoom in on face…
900 views
JPatrick
May 13, 2009
Multi-Threading FTW: Part 1
These entries are a bit rapid fire so far, but that's mainly the result of having a bunch of backlogged topics that finally added up enough for me to break down and write them. Things will slow down pretty soon.

Switching gears to a more concrete issue this time, I'm going to talk about the performa…
748 views
JPatrick
May 11, 2009
Geometry Slicing
Before moving on to more platform specific topics, I'll detail the general algorithms in this installment.

The first thing I did was write a pseudo 5x5 matrix class. Rotations, scales, skews, etc. can all be handled by the built in 4x4 matrix provided by XNA, but to be able to combine translation in…
1,049 views
JPatrick
May 11, 2009
First Entry
This is the first entry, but I've actually been working on the game for about 6 months. It didn't occur to me to write about it until recently, and even then I waffled back and forth about actually doing it. I didn't want to use some generic blog site, so I just took the plunge and got GDNet+. I su…
808 views
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