menyo

With the Load method?

You don't need someones inventory if someone is offline right? If you do want that then the filename should not be thisplayer.xml but otherplayer.xml. You could also make a dictionary that uses userID's that point to filenames or something like that. You could serialize that dictionary too and do something like this:

1. Player wants to do something with another persons inventory:
2. Load inventory dictionary.
3. Lookup that persons ID in the dictionary.
4. Load the inventory attached to this ID.
5. Do something with that inventory.

C++ is the language of choice, but there's a steep learning curve and you probably are more interested in learning games,

This is wrongly formatted and really depends on what you actually want to accomplish. So i add to it, C++ is the language of choice to develop AAA titles at major developers. By the looks of your first post this should be changed too "C++ is the language of choice to not come in contact with for a long long while".

I pretty much come from where you are at now, "created some simple games and want more". I chose C# to be my language which is a pretty easy language and you should get allong with it very quickly since you have experience with VB. I use C# and XNA to develop games and it's great. You have a very user friendly language with XNA to get into game design right away. It has all the freedom you need to create anything you want. You have plenty tutorials for it and you have animated sprited roaming your screen in a matter of hours.

If you are looking for something without much coding but significantly less freedom you should have a look at Game Maker, but i don't have any experience with that. I believe you won't have to code anything and create sidescrollers with it.

I updated the code, you'll need more references like System.IO for handling files.

Well i can help you with writing/reading XML data in C#.

Let's say this is your item class that uses a string for the type of the item and a int for the player ID.

public class TheData
	{
		public string SomeName;
		public int SomeNumber;
	}

Here is a simple class i could serialize this data into xml and load it back in.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

class Serializer
	{
		TheData data = new TheData();
		public Serializer(string theName, int theNumber)
		{
			data.SomeName = theName;
			data.SomeNumber = theNumber;
		}
		public void Save(string fileName)
		{
			Stream stream = File.Create(fileName);
			XmlSerializer serialize = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TheData));
			serialize.Serialize(stream, data);
			stream.Close();
		}
		public static TheData Load(string fileName)
		{
			Stream stream = File.OpenRead(fileName);
			XmlSerializer serialize = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TheData));
			return (TheData)serialize.Deserialize(stream);
		}
	}

Was just about to say Blue compliments orange very well. Maybe you want to shift the blue more to full blue or even slightly to the red and make it a little bit darker. Make the text itself blue/cyan but keep it bright enough to read correctly.

Never use IE.... have made websites and browser games in the passed and having to deal with IE as a webdeveloper is a real pain. Get a proper browser like, firefox, chrome, safari or opera.

-edit-
What? -1 rep.....

say this on a web developer board and i'm +100 and twitter ww trending topic .

Seriously IE is no good, not for web developers and not for clients, hence the popularity of the other browsers that come with many plugins and tools to suit your needs. Seriously try another browser and you regret giving -rep. The only reason why IE is still popular is that it's already installed and most people stick with it because they never tried anything else.

-edit-
Thanks for +1

I have a question:

I am currently working with a group of 20 friends. You can consider us as indie game developers. We want to make a fps game but for that we need a little help as we are only at our learning stage. We have figured out how an object is made, textured and animated in 3ds max 2012. We know that XNA game studio 4.0 is good for us beginners as we know visual C#.net quite enough. But we cant figure out four things:

1) How this stuff works from start to end? As in a model is created, textured.........all the way up to the state that the model is programmed to do numerous stuff according to its animated stuff

2) Can you suggest us books so that 3D Graphic Designing, 3D Programming, Audio Editing becomes easy for us.

3) For the programmers: A game can be programmed in only one computer. But i want that our group of programmers should work together on one project instead of one programming and others just looking.

4) Are we lost or are we getting somewhere with this amount of knowledge as yet?

Note: Please dont suggest any game engine nor do we want to make one. We just want to make a game as cool as bf3 and we will work our backs into it to get it done.
Can you help us please? We will be greatful!


Regards,
Rayyan Tahir

1. Model, map, texture, rig and animate the object in a (or several) 3D app. Then import the model in you language of choice, for XNA you should export it to .fbx and it will be ready to go to load into a a model instance.

Model themodel;
themodel = Content.Load<Model>("Path/Model_Name");

2. Just get a XNA4.0 book should do the trick.
http://www.amazon.co...rds=xna&x=0&y=0

3. Look into source controll software. Can't help you on that since i never used it.

4. May sound rude, but i think you guys are very lost. It seams there is little knowledge in your team and the target is something as epic as BF. Each of you should target something as epic as PONG first. Did any of you guys finished a small project like that already? On the other hand you might learn a good deal from this but don't expect the project to finish.

The hard way:

If you have no to very little knowledge i sugest learning about C# first. Get the basics down, this will take you at least a weak or two, if you have plenty of time and dedication. Why C#? well it's a user friendly language with a lot of online content for it. You do have other languages you could pick from, search the forums for info on what to pick if your not sure about learning C#.

If you know the main principles of object oriented programming and feeling comfortable in C# you could start looking for a library that helps you creating a game. A very popular one for C# is XNA it has a very large fan base, i use it myself and i love it. But there are other libraries like SDL. Now you have to learn how to use these libraries and start from the bottom by making something like pong and tetris, you simple can't create a FPS right of the bat. You won't be making a FPS a fraction as good as counterstrike for many many months.

The mediocre way:
Download UDK, it's free untill you release a project. Once you know your way around in this awesome engine you will be able to start jamming levels together upon opening this app. Getting your own FPS out of this takes a little bit more work. In UDK you can do a lot of things visually, i mean without typing any code at all. But learning it's scripting language will help you a great deal in customizing your game. If you know C# you are even more flexible by importing code into UDK.

The easy way:
Use Hammer, it comes with Halflife 2 and CS2 is made with it (also with scripting and most probably adding axtra code to it). But it's the closest you can start off with to make something like CS.

Creating a game is not only about programming. You need models, textures, sounds, music, UI, stories, etc. Your not going to make a full game in a long while and thats why you should start off small. Get familiar with the app your using and start small, by making a game like pong or if you want to use UDK start off with a simple room then add a door then make a trigger for it, etc. There are plenty of tutorials out there for each app i mentioned above. Start learning and be dedicated, if you thought this was easy go open steam pick CS and press play and come back when your ready for it.

Then you should learn d3d or opengl.... But i would really advice you to pickup a library like sdl to speed up work and stop wasting time making your own libraries and engines.

If your new to programming i would advice you to stay away from C++, get into C# it's a much easier language. You would not need C++ for many years and it's much faster to learn. If you are just started learning C++ then prepare for a long long journey till you can get that plane to show up on screen. While you could get C# and XNA and start flying/walking around in a matter of hours (with some experience and a tutorial). When you know C#, you should get into C++ without much problems but C++ is a hard language and really not suited for beginners.

Well you should learn how to program....

Seriously, what language are you using? You could just upload this in UDK and start walking around on your plane in a view minutes....

You might want to look at some skyboxes and how they are implemented.

XNA let's you go into the game logic right away. Without much prior knowledge of programming i managed to load in a model, setting up the matrices very quickly and i could step into moving it.

Especially with your knowledge the step should be very small to get going with XNA, it's an amazing library. I will certainly recommend it to you.

Had a really quick look at.What size is your sprite? You hard coded 32 in there. You should use "image.width / 2".

By the looks of it, the above should fix the problem. Is your image 32*32? then it pivots on it's bottom right corner. The origin should be the center of the sprite.

Is there somekind of clone stamp tool in Gimp? I always use it to erase seems from every kind of texture.

The best way to hide tiling is obviously have more tiles for the same terrain. But letting more obvious details flow from one tile to another really hides the tiling effect, obviously this is very hard to accomplish especially on larger textures. Games like final fantasy really accomplishes this goal very well, but they are working with no more then 32p tiles.

If all i wanted is a challenge then I would be studying comlicated math on the einstein level until i get some sort of epiphany or maybe I'd even enjoy learning programming.
I don't enjoy programming even though it's challenging, I only like the reward of making something you're interested in with programming... as in a cool game, not just any game.

In every single way the game is the challenge and the reward is the ending. Whatever happens in between, like getting a new weapon for completing a level is obsolete after you are done with the game. Off course the game needs to be fun to engage in the challenge but that was not the question since for some people racing games are fun, for others online FPS and there are even people that are finding fun at studying math up to the einstein level.

It's pretty small but i really like the look of this platform. It consists of 6 tiles since i want the player to walk in the middle (vertically) of the grass. I did this the pixel art way, using 4 green tints 3 rock tints and 3 purple'ish tints to fill up the darker areas between the rocks. I pretty much need 1 or 2 extra mid sections for some variation, then i will work on some walls. The background and character will be a pain though :S.