Sorry about all the delay, I wrote 4 blog posts already in this week, but did not finish them up (was always too tired to post them). I will post them in the next few days. Instead this blog post is just about today.

The day started with the Community GetTogether Event from Microsoft on the CeBIT, where all the MVPs, CLIP, RDs, Student Partners, Codezone-Experts and Microsoft Evengelists from Germany met. Last year I could not attend the CeBIT or the Community GetTogether in Germany because I was on the GDC 2007 in San Francisco and wrote the GDC Dungeon Quest game there ^^

The first session was about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Download it here if you want to try it out, it got some nice features for developers and other things like Activities and Webslices, which sound nice, but you will have to wait until more websites actually support them. The browser does not convince me yet. Maybe the presentation was not that great, many webpages did not look ok and the browser crashed several times, it also looks pretty much the same as IE7. I'm still using Firefox 2 (and 3 for playing around a bit) a lot more than any other browser, especially thanks to great addons like FireBug.

Anyway, after another session about Students in Germany and their lack of .NET knowledge and other things like how many do wash their clothes themselfs, the nice girl in front of me from Microsoft reminded me to take some photos myself :) Got ya, haha.


In between the sessions I met with my good friend Luo Yu (see photo, he is an amazing graphic artist and works with me on a couple of projects) and an ex-intern of mine Stefan Kraus from BiteTheBytes.com (see website link for more information, no photo here ^^). Stefan is involved in some interesting projects, some smaller games and especially his Cloddy Technology, which was created by him and 2 other friends to render huge 3D landscape areas with high performance in a unlimited amount of detail (well, after asking what that means it turns out it is limited by doubles ^^).


I sat through another session of the GetTogether Event, this time by my good old compadre Dirk Primbs about Visual Studio 2008. He has a lot of webcasts links on his blog, check it out if you want to see some german sessions :) Otherwise you should definately check out the Mix08 Session Videos from Las Vegas, I find the Video with the fake Elvis asking people about Silverlight 2.0 the funniest.

After some networking and meeting Microsoft people I joined with the other guys and walked through some CeBIT halls. Nothing special about the halls or people, it was very packed as always on Saturdays.


And as you can see here, if you look into this absolutely normal looking device and put these absolutely non-freaky glasses on, you can see some non-ugly animated figure telling waving at you in 3D. But beware, after a minute you might get some headaches and you have of course keep your head still and only look from a certain angle and distance. Man, when do they ever stop producing this bullshit? It is always the same kind of device in the last 10 years and no one buys it or really wants it.


Ok, here we see one of the exhibitors of the Games Convention 2008 throwing some stuff into the crowd .. wait a second, we are not on the Games Convention yet, this is still the CeBIT, but ok, it is Saturday and the people do not care where the presents are coming from. Fun to watch as always, and we have to ignore the fact that 10 years ago I was one of those guys too wanting to get a free ball pen I would never use.


These guys are building a freaking looking robot and have certainly not seen the new Terminator series yet. They are actually from the TU Chemnitz (a university) and it was a tournament where the robots had to play a game with tennis balls to catch some rings and score some points. Not as brutal as the Robot Wars (tv series), but certainly amazing work from students and a lot of participants. Nice athmosphere building and testing these robots by the way, there were many tables like this.


And here we see one of the teams testing their robot. And you can see me not having any useful camera, the robot was not even moving fast ^^ I should buy some better equipment for the next event I go to (next one will probably be the MVP Summit in a month).


Ok, we are back to the throwing useless stuff into crowd part!


And this is the huge booth of the T-Com/Telekom (together with IBM and SAP one of the biggest and best looking booths) where a lot of sessions were hold in the so called "Trendforum". You can watch all the videos from the CeBIT Trendforum here, some of the sessions are in english and the speakers are very good and have some interesting topics. I did not watch any of them there, but once my brother told me about it and gave me the link I watched some videos and were very pleased with them, especially the one from Nicholas Carr (author of book The Big Switch) about the changes in moving from local servers to a "world computer".


Big cars and small womans (that is what Luo told me as I took this picture) should also be on all fairs. Do we remember where this was? No, not really!


The Samsung booth was also very big, but I could not spot any new exciting big monitors. But there were a lot of small devices, headsets, mp3 players and other stuff that does not really interest me that much these days. I'm currently in the "I got all I need"-mode :)


And here you can see the plan of one of my new cities, just that is not by me and in fact some big company in Asia planing a new city part this way. Looks nice (is about 50cm x 50cm small).


This was really strange. We went on the Microsoft booth and just behind all the Xboxes and games there was a bakery. You could actually get some biscuits and bread after filling out a form about some IT questions.


And while we are on the Microsoft booth we thought about the question if Bill Gates might need some extra money to become the richest man on the world again after losing his first place the first time after 13 years this week. Maybe all Microsoft employees should start collecting some money for Bill :) This nice lady was trying to convince people to get active in the Microsoft Student Partner program, but I guess I'm already too old (oh my).


And here you can see me sitting down for a minute and happy that we can go home soon (hey, I'm a programmer sitting around all day, I'm not used to walking that much) :)


But we are not done yet, let take a look at this IBM server with 64 hard disks up to 500 GB, in total something like 30 TB storage space. You can even stack up (well, not on top of each other, just side by side in a big room) 6 of those beasts if that is not enough for you. But as we have learned from the webcast from Nicholas Carr above we won't need that much power in the future, just use the servers that are already in the internet. Other than that these things are not really cheap, I prefer building my own server setup.


In hall 18 there was a really loud band singing "Sex Bomb" and they actually did a good job. After spending some minutes there our ears almost explode and we went outside to cool off. Poor guys spending all those days in that booth (Trekstor actually, hey I remembered something).


And finally the ride back in a train full of people. We even took an early train, I do not want to know how full the later trains have been. Ok, time to finish up my other blog posts. I hope you enjoyed these pictures.

Even when I did not post much last week I was very busy converting all the old XNA 1.0 games to XNA 2.0. I did not only convert all projects (8 games in total, see below), but I also tested them extensively on Windows XP, Vista (32 and 64 bit) and the Xbox 360. Additionally a lot of usability improvements have been implemented in the games, for example the XNA Shooter is now much easier (was almost impossible to even reach 50% of the level) and a lot more fun due better balancing. The XNA Racing Game has now a better physic engine and will not longer let the car fly out of the track or leave ground in loopings. Due the better input control and fixed physics the cars drive now much faster and it is more challenging to complete the tracks in shorter time frames.

Games in this article:

• Chapter1Game
• Xna Pong
• Xna Breakout
• Xna Tetris
• Rocket Commander Xna
• Xna Shooter
• Xna Racing Game
• Dungeon Quest GDC

Please read my previous post about Converting XNA 1.0 games to XNA 2.0 for all technical tips. All the games can also be found on http://XnaProjects.net, but I will also make them easier accessible on this blog soon, which has an update overdue (need to clean up the left and right sides) ^^

Thanks to the great VS2005 support of XNA 2.0 all games have now just one single solution file, which works on Windows and the Xbox 360. The projects can be opened in XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 without having to convert the files over and over again like in the past. The Icons for all games were also improved. Lets take a look at the Icons (.ico files) on Windows:


For the Xbox 360 game icons the .png files (usually named GameThumbnail.png) are used:


Ok, let's take a look at the games and what has changed for them. Most games are pretty much the same as for XNA 1.0, but a lot of smaller bugs were fixed and they have been tested more.

• Chapter1Game: This application is not really a game, but a test project to check out if XNA 2.0 is properly working on both Windows and the Xbox 360. It is from the first chapter of my book "Professional XNA Game Programming". BTW: The second edition of the book is coming out soon, there are 3 more chapters about Multiplayer game programming and a cool new role playing game.
  
  
  • Game Installer: Chapter1GameSetup.exe (210 KB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: Chapter1GameSourceCode.zip (57 KB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Xna Pong: Xna Pong is a simple clone of the favorite pong game from 1978. It is just a few hunderd lines of code and should be very easy to understand.
  
  This game is from the book "Professional XNA Game Programming" by Benjamin Nitschke. For more information read chapter 2. (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0)
  
  
  • Game Installer: XnaPongSetup.exe (309 KB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: XnaPongSourceCode.zip (258 KB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Xna Breakout: XNA Breakout is a simple Breakout/Arcanoid game based on the XNA Pong game from the previous chapter.
  
  It is fully described and covered in Chapter 3 of my book "Professional XNA Game Programming". The code is quite short and should be easy to understand. (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0)
  
  
  • Game Installer: XnaBreakoutSetup.exe (383 KB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: XnaBreakoutSourceCode.zip (316 KB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Xna Tetris: This is a simple, but highly addictive Tetris game. You can control the blocks with your cursor keys, aswd or a game pad and the game works both on Windows and the Xbox 360. Reaching levels above 5 is really hard. My highest level was 9, try to reach more :) (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0)
  
  This game introduces the helper classes (chapter 4 of my book) and makes more use of unit testing and game components in XNA.
  
  
  • Game Installer: XnaTetrisSetup.exe (310 KB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: XnaTetrisSourceCode.zip (277 KB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Rocket Commander Xna: XNA port of the famous Rocket Commander game. The game principle stayed the same, but the controls were a little bit simplified to make it more fun on the Xbox 360.
  
  If you want to learn more about the Rocket Commander game, check out its official website www.RocketCommander.com and check out the Video Tutorials on Coding4Fun by MSDN. (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0, also supports very big resolutions now and runs faster on the Xbox 360)
  
  
  • Game Installer: RocketCommanderXnaSetup.exe (16.5 MB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: RocketCommanderXnaSourceCode.zip (52.8 MB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Xna Shooter: Shoot'n'up game specifically created for my book "Professional XNA Game Programming". It features full HDTV support, runs on Windows and the Xbox 360, 5 weapon types, 5 enemy types, a powerful ship and some power ups. It is quite fun to play and it gets harder and harder the longer you play. Based partly on the Rocket Commander XNA engine, but also features lots of new effects and shaders. (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0, also much easier and balanced)
  
  This game and the racing game are the most improved. The game works now much better in high resolutions and on the Xbox 360. But most importantly the game is now much easier, balanced and more fun. Additionally a level percentage is now visible on the bottom and more EMP bombs can be picked up to make it easier at the end of the level.
  
  • Game Installer: XnaShooterSetup.exe (14.9 MB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: XnaShooterSourceCode.zip (32.2 MB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Xna Racing Game: XNA Racing Game Starter Kit I wrote for http://creators.xna.com. More information and more downloads can be found on http://XnaRacingGame.com. It runs best on the Xbox 360 in HDTV (1920x1200), but it also runs fine on the PC. (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0, driving also improved a lot, better tested on Xbox 360 and fixed some issues).
  
  Following things were improved: Shadow mapping on very big resolutions works now (crashed before), more options for lower quality settings, fixed physics, car now always stays on the road, fixed loopings, cars are much faster now, winning conditions work better now, and fixed several other bugs.
  
  • Game Installer: XnaRacingGameSetup.exe (40.2 MB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: XnaRacingGameSourceCode.zip (95.4 MB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    
• Dungeon Quest GDC: And finally the Dungeon Quest XNA Game, which was developed in just 4 days on the GDC 2007 at the XNA Contest. Dungeon Quest GDC is a relatively complex 3D role playing game (at least for just 4 days of work). An early version even supported coop multiplayer on the Xbox 360 via splitscreen. The game was developed by Benjamin Nitschke (abi.exDream.com) and Christoph Rienaecker (WAII). (2008-02-10: Now updated to XNA 2.0). This is NOT the full Dungeon Quest game (see www.DungeonQuestGame.com for that), this is just the GDC version.
  
  Please note that the level was reduced to allow loading on the Xbox 360 (which otherwise crashes with an OutOfMemoryException), the game is not fully playable, only the first part is implemented. You can also press F2 to toggle the Options menu and some minor bugs were fixed. But this game is no longer supported, I will not improve it anymore! Please check out the new Dungeon Quest game from www.DungeonQuestGame.com, which is coming in a month or so.
  
  • Game Installer: DungeonQuestGDCSetup.exe (25.6 MB)
  • Source Code and Game Content: DungeonQuestGDCSourceCode.zip (67.2 MB)
  • Screenshot:
    
    
    

Have fun with all the games :)

As I briefly mentioned before one of my companies (realis communities) moved to Hamburg and we got a nice new office directly at the Alster sea in the city.

Here are a few pictures to give you an impression. We work here for a few weeks now and are now setteled in.

This is my desk, as you can see, there are a "few" monitors there (and all of them quite big, ranging from 24 to 19 inch). I mainly look at the big 24" in the middle, but also use the other two. On the left side is my laptop, it is not always there, but it is useful from time to time if I need another PC for testing something. But even with this large space (I control everything with 1 keyboard and mouse via the program Synergy), I still have so many overlapping windows. After reading this article (Joining The Prestigious Three Monitor Club) from Jeff Atwood at CodingHorror.com I thought the more space you have the less overlapping windows you should have. But it is more like the more space you have, the more programs you have opened up :) I still use Switcher quite a lot to find the program windows again.


Ok, back to the office, this is one of the other rooms where most of my colleagues sit, currently most of them are away shooting some new video for meinSport TV. They are all nice guys, but you know, no programmers, do I have to say more?


Then there is finally the view out of the window, its still winter, but all that water from the Alster is comforting.

Next I will shoot some photos of my setup at home (more PCs, less monitors, but big ones ^^). I hope this does not bore you.

When I wrote this (a little bit each day while working on converting the old XNA projects) I was very aware about the disappointment of my blog readers about the fact that I did not blog much in the last couple of months, especially on XNA. I not only got a lot of emails about that, but also quite a lot of questions, especially since XNA 2.0 was released. I made yet another promise to myself to change that and finally blog more, maybe not only when something very interesting pops up, but instead about the everyday issues I run into.

Some Notes about XNA 2.0: More solid, lots of little new features, networking, while it may not be a very complete solution, at least it is now possible on the Xbox 360 and overall I have the feeling even more people are interested in XNA than a year ago. Plus the guys at the XNA Team doing a great job and are constantly improving the XNA Creators Club website for us game programmers and artists :)


Several people had problems using the old XNA 1.0 code of my games and make them work with XNA 2.0, so here is a little help in case you want to convert XNA 1.0 projects to XNA 2.0. You will also notice this if you go to any XNA community site as most samples will still be in XNA 1.0 and not work out of the box in XNA 2.0, and many of those will probably never be changed since they are not longer actively being developed.

For most games almost all of the code can stay unchanged, you just have to poke at a few things that have changed in the framework or were improved. More information about converting projects can be found here (read this first, this article is based on the stuff there). You can also use the Cross-Platform Game Project Converter from XNA 2.0 to add a Xbox 360 project to your existing Windows XNA project without having to create a separate project (it is helpful, but I used pretty much the same trick for all of my XNA 1.0 games anyway).

Let's go through the steps:

1. Either use the XNA project conversion utility (can be found on the XNA Creators Club website) or just create a new XNA 2.0 project in VS 2005.
   
   
2. If you created a new project, drag all source code files into the project and seperate the content files out and put them all in the existing Content directory (only there the content pipeline is activated). If you just converted a project and the content files did not move, move them yourself to the content directory. Gladly all my projects with more than 5 content files had a special content directory anyway, so no need to change anything content-wise for them. If you don't want some of the files to be compiled to .xnb files, you have to change the build action from "compile" to "content" (and then use the "copy to output directory" switch) or to "none" if you want them to be ignored like for .wav files, which are automatically processed by the .xct (XACT) file for you.
   
   
3. Find the line content = new ContentManager(Services); and replace it with Content.RootDirectory = "Content";. If you do that, get rid of the content manager in your game class since you can now use the build-in Content property to access the underlying Game content manager. In case you don't want to do that or if you need an extra variable, replace the above line with content = new ContentManager(Services, "Content");. Both ways will make sure all the content is now loaded from the content directory instead from the main directory of the application. In more complex XNA games you can also change the BaseGameDirectory to the content directory, but then you would also have to move all other resource files to this directory (config files, save games, levels, etc.). It is usually a good idea to separate the compiled (.xnb) content from the content the user can change (config, levels, etc.), so I suggest just redirecting the content directory of the content manager.
   
   
4. Replace the LoadGraphicsContent(bool) method with LoadContent, remove all the if (loadAllContent) commands (was never false anyway, just let the content of the if loop stay) and also remove the call to base.LoadGraphicsContent(bool) (does not do anything like all the Load or Unload methods in the XNA Game class, they are just empty virtual methods). You can also ignore this and the next step since it will only generate depreciated warnings, but I suggest cleaning up your source code whenever an opportunity like this presents itself. I also added some missing region blocks to the code and some comments here and there were they were missing.
   
   
5. Finally delete the UnloadGraphicsContent method unless it did anything beside base.Unload and base.UnloadGraphicsContent. In my XNA games the UnloadGraphicsContent usually looked like this and can be safely removed now (at least if nothing else is in there):

/// <summary>
/// Unload graphic content if the device gets lost.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="unloadAllContent">Unload everything?</param>
protected override void UnloadGraphicsContent(bool unloadAllContent)
{
  if (unloadAllContent == true)
    content.Unload();

  base.UnloadGraphicsContent(unloadAllContent);
} // UnloadGraphicsContent(loadAllContent)



6. In case you load sound and music via the AudioEngine, you have to change the directory to the content directory too, which will not be done automatically for you since you load the .xct file directly in the AudioEngine constructor. Basically just exchange the following code:
   
   

   audioEngine = new AudioEngine("YourSound.xgs");
   waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, "Wave Bank.xwb");
   soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, "Sound Bank.xsb");
   

   with:
   

   audioEngine = new AudioEngine("Content\\YourSound.xgs");
   waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, "Content\\Wave Bank.xwb");
   soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, "Content\\Sound Bank.xsb");

      
   
7. In case you have used the StorageDevice and specifically the ShowStorageDeviceGuide helper method, it is gone now in XNA 2.0. I had it in some helper classes, but never actually used it. In case you want to show a save game dialog (or some network game select dialog for example), please follow the XNA 2.0 help instructions to do this asynchronously now.
   
   
8. In case you use any ResourceUsage enum, replace it with TextureUsage instead or remove it if the issue is not texture related. You can also safely remove any ResourceManagementMode.Automatic parameters, which are not longer supported. Everything is now automatic anyway. Just if you have been using ResourceUsage.RenderTarget you will need to change the Texture2D class to a ResolveTexture2D class in order to archive the same behaviour as before. Some calls to the device (e.g. ResolveBackBuffer) have also changed and require a ResolveTexture2D now. You may also want to check if you have any manual texture management or disposing, which you can remove or simplify.
   
   
9. For simpler games (2D) games you should be done now. More complex games using render targets and other features that have changed in XNA 2.0 will require some more changes, but after you have done them once (or know where to change what) this is also a quick process.

The following only applies to the RocketCommanderXna, XnaShooter and XnaRacingGame engines, but you might find similarities with other XNA games and the converting process:

1. First of all make sure the old XNA 1.1 code gets compileable by going though the changes mentioned above (e.g. replacing ResourceUsage with TextureUsage or BufferUsage) and removing everything that does not exist anymore (like ResourceManagementMode.Automatic). If a method is non-existent in XNA 2.0 like ResolveRenderTarget, comment it out and remember where it happened.
   
   
2. You might go through other issues, but you have to come back to the RenderTarget issue. This took the most time in the converting process for me (probably half of all my issues come by something related to changes with RenderTargets in XNA 2.0). For that reason always make sure that rendering to textures still works while you make changing. I always used the TestCreateRenderToTexture unit test inside the RenderToTexture class to figure things out.
   
   
3. Additionally to making some changes in the BaseGame class (loading content via LoadContent, using the base.Content instead of creating a new content manager, etc.) I also removed all the RenderTarget helper methods and fields from the BaseGame class (SetRenderTarget, ResetRenderTarget, etc.) and moved them into the RenderToTexture class. While this makes the code more clean and restructured by making a few more fields private, if you do not call the new InitializeDepthBufferFormatAndMultisampling of the RenderToTexture class the calls to SetRenderTarget and ResetRenderTarget will not work correctly and will not restore the default depth buffer (which has to be remembered first). If you get the following exception it means the DepthBuffer Device.DepthStencilBuffer was set to null, but is obviously still used. In order to fix that make sure the remDepthBuffer variable is set to a correct value in the InitializeDepthBufferFormatAndMultisampling method!
   


An error has occurred during the Clear operation while trying to clear the depth or stencil buffer, no DepthStencilBuffer surface exists.
System.InvalidOperationException: An error has occurred during the Clear operation while trying to clear the depth or stencil buffer, no DepthStencilBuffer surface exists.
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear(ClearOptions options, Color color, Single depth, Int32 stencil, Rectangle[] regions)
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color color)

   

4. 4. Even if you have now done everything, the app may still crash when you are trying to clear a render target (which usually happens at the start of each pre or post screen shader). The reason for the following error is the multi sampling format, which might be set to the background buffer, but not to the render targets:
   

   
   The active render target and depth stencil surface must have the same pixel size and multisampling type.
   System.InvalidOperationException: The active render target and depth stencil surface must have the same pixel size and multisampling type.
   at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.GraphicsDevice.VerifyDepthRenderTargetCompat()
   at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear(ClearOptions options, Color color, Single depth, Int32 stencil, Rectangle[] regions)

      
   In order to get rid of this error without changing the RenderToTexture class a lot, you can just comment out the line where multi sampling is activated in BaseGame:
   

   //this.graphics.PreferMultiSampling = true;

There are probably even more things that I forgot while converting the projects (converted 8 games and about 15 projects in total now), but the above list should be helpful. Especially for me because I always forget some of those little things and having this checklist is very helpful.

Tomorrow I will probably test all the XNA 2.0 games on my Xbox 360 and make some final adjustments and then post them all on http://XnaProjects.net (and here).

A friend of mine (Hi Frederic Schneider ^^) wrote a little article on gameports.net about the work conditions in the games sector, especially about game programmers, designers, artists and journalists. I also answered some questions. It is written in german and may only apply to Germany, but I guess it is not much different in other countries (relative low wages, not a good job security, lots of underpayed interns, long workhours).

Here is the article:

• http://www.gameports.net/cms/meldung,medien-kritik-an-arbeitsbedingungen-in-der-spielebranche,2292.html

And here is a followup article:

• http://www.gameports.net/cms/artikel,medien-eine-branche-im-aufwrtstrend,801.html

In case you run into the following error:

Could not load file or assembly 'xunit, Version=7.10.25.1028, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
    System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'xunit, Version=7.10.25.1028, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
    File name: 'xunit, Version=7.10.25.1028, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'
    at Xunit.TdNet.TdNetRunner.RunTests(Type type, MethodInfo method, ITestListener listener, TestRunState& runState)
    at Xunit.TdNet.TdNetRunner.RunMethod(MethodInfo method, ITestListener testListener)
    at TestDriven.TestRunner.AdaptorTestRunner.Run(ITestListener testListener, ITraceListener traceListener, String assemblyPath, String testPath)
    at TestDriven.TestRunner.ThreadTestRunner.Runner.Run()
    
    WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF.
    To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1.
    Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.
    To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].

This usually just means you have installed a newer version of xunit (in my case 1.0.0.1105), but you also had an older (beta, rc, etc.) version of xunit before, which maybe used the xunit.installer.exe utility to add support to TestDriven.NET 2.x or ReSharper 3.0. Just disable the support with this tool, Visual Studio and TestDriven (or ReSharper) work fine with the new version without that extra tool. In fact you can delete it after you have disabled all options.

Hi everyone,

I prepared some new exciting blog posts, especially about XNA and I will post them shortly and also quite a few things will change at this blog. Stay tuned.

Recently one of my companies (namely realis) moved to Hamburg and I have a new PC at the new office, where I installed Visual Studio 2008 and everything else I needed. After I downloaded the latest source code files from Team System, I ran into some problems. BTW: The Team System trial will end next month and I will probably not switch back to SubVersion, but instead go back to Visual SourceSafe since the integration is the best in Visual Studio. Team System is nice to have but absolutely not something important for me as I'm most of the time the only guy using it anyways.

Back to the Problem. After I loaded the main solution the 2 web applications in it were unable to be loaded. The rest of the projects did load fine and worked after a while until I had all the missing Assemblies installed (xunit, Ajax stuff, Silverlight, IronPython, EntitySpaces, etc.). But even after making sure Silverlight and the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Alpha was installed and working (checked it by creating a new Silverlight project, which worked fine), I was still unable to load those projects. I thought at first maybe something went wrong when I checked in or out all the files, but after testing it on my laptop this was not the issue, all files are intact. Everything worked just fine on my laptop, where I had done most of my work during the move and first weeks until everything was finally working here.

After digging around a bit I went back to the IIS were those 2 websites should run on and they did not run yet (not compiled yet, no wonder). But even after I pointed to some dummy website the IIS did throw out some errors (first some dlls were missing, they were quickly replaced, then some security issues with Vista, also easy). Then I pointed back to the location of the projects and made sure IIS was working this time. Now I could go back to Visual Studio and finally load the web projects.

If you have such a InteropServices.COMException, try to see if you have missed something like the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Alpha and then figure out if your IIS is working. You can also edit the .csproj file and remove the references to IIS at the very end of the file to see if the project can then be loaded (using IIS again is not hard through the project properties).

Hope this helps (phase stolen from ScottGu, btw: really cool stuff going on over there, the ASP.NET MVC framework is nice and the .NET Framework SourceCode is very helpful!)

As mentioned here in the official press message from Microsoft XNA 2.0 was released today after a very short beta phase which did only run for a few weeks.

You can download XNA 2.0 from Creators.Xna.Com, but for now it just says "XNA Game Studio 2.0 will be available early morning, Thursday Dec 13th, 2007 PST.". This will hopefully change soon ^^

http://creators.xna.com/Education/GettingStarted.aspx

Since XNA 2.0 is now out I will talk about some of its new features shortly and comment a little bit about the new networking API and Xbox LIVE features. Stay tuned.

I just saw the following post on Scott Hanselman's blog:

And I thought, why not push one of the videos my team at meinSport.de has produced as well. It is pretty funny, but just available in German:

The long awaited XNA Game Studio 2.0 beta is now available and can be downloaded from the XNA Creators Club website: http://creators.xna.com/beta/betahome.aspx

My first impression of the new multiplayer API is not that good. While it is very nice to have the ability to use networking on the Xbox 360, it is not only too hard to make it work on just a Windows PC and secondly you cannot expect that your gamers will both have a Xbox LIVE Gold membership AND a XNA Creators Club membership (both cost money). This means if you really want to do networking on a Windows XNA 2.0 game, you have to use System.Net and write it all yourself or no one will ever play your game on Windows except some XNA developers maybe.

Other than that XNA 2.0 is a great improvement, but it does only work with VS2005 yet, maybe they missed the VS2008 release earlier yesterday ^^ But it will probably be possible to modify the .csproj files again to make it work in VS2008 (without the extra XNA features and content pipeline).

Great news from ScottGu's blog: The final Visual Studio 2008 version and .NET 3.5 were just released :)

I have been waiting the whole day and kept refreshing the MSDN page, but I could not really believe that they actually ship today ^^

VS 2008 will probably not be much of a change for me because we have been working with the VS 2008 betas for over a year now.

I might also blog a little bit about IronPython, which I have used for smaller projects and plan using for bigger stuff in the future too. The best feed for IronPython News is: IronPython Url's

Btw: Pretty quiet on my blog for a while now, I should continue blogging. Always being too busy to write anything here is not a good thing. Gladly all my current projects work really good and are still fun to maintain, even as they grow bigger and bigger.

Update 2007-11-20: I have to say the ASP.NET Designer in VS2008 is really good again. The designer did not work well for most of my projects in VS2008 beta 2 and it was always annoying to have the million ASP.NET errors poluting the ErrorList (now they are just warnings and can easily be switched off). Overall I'm very pleased with the VS2008 so far, uninstalling VS2008 beta2 was a bit of work, but everything is working nicely now. More info and improvements in VS2008 can be found on ScottGu's blog

From http://nerddawg.blogspot.com/2007/09/ nothing-beats-shipping-silverlight-10.html:
Today Microsoft announced the debut release of Silverlight, the new cross-browser, cross-platform technology for developing compelling media experiences and RIAs. I joined the Silverlight effort around November of 2006 from working on WPF 3.5 feature areas, and it has been a wonderful ride. Working on two different product releases – Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - simultaneously is a very unique experience not easily summarized in a blog post. The kind of stuff this team has done in a matter of months is nothing short of amazing. We joke internally about how someday books will be written about these episodes; and needless to say, about the giants upon whose shoulders people like me stood. But for now, I’m happy and tremendously fortunate to have been a part of shipping a great product that millions will use and love.

I agree with that statement, not much I can add. I'm glad to see Silverlight 1.0 is now final and Scott Guthrie and his team will now focus on improving Silverlight 1.1. In our german sport community website meinSport.de we already use Silverlight too and we plan to add even more features with that exciting technology in the near future.

You can get Silverlight at Silverlight.net

Warning: Shameless plug ahead.

We at realis communities (german community website builder company, bla bla, see links at the right side: meinSport.de, StudiHelp.de) are searching for C#/ASP.NET Programmers right now. Since we are a german company and the following is posted on german job sites, you probably won't understand it if you can't read german. Anyway, feel free to send us an application if you are interested (and skilled of course ^^).

And the same thing as a word document:
SearchingForMeinSportCoder.doc (216.5 KB)

Ziggyware has a good overview of the XNA 2.0 announcements and GameFest conference sessions in the following post. Check it out if you are interested in the new XNA 2.0 features (mainly networking, which is really a big step forward). It is also nice to see so many new XNA games and development efforts :)

http://www.ziggyware.com/news.php?readmore=407

Microsoft XNA: Ready for Prime Time?

is the name of the Article of the CoDe Magazine. It is very well written and a really long (9 pages) read with tons of information in it.
Together with 6 other guys I was interviewed about my experiences with XNA and the development process of the
XNA Racing Game and Dungeon Quest, which are 2 of the best looking XNA games so far :)

Check it out, good work Nick Landry.

When you have some Silverlight 1.1 alpha code and want to use it with the new Silverlight 1.1 alpha refresh bits, you should make sure to replace all assemblies and recompile any libraries you have. You still might get quite a few errors because of some minor changes in the javascript code. I haven't fixed all issues yet, but the main one was replacing the Silverlight.js and fixing the .js files for html (or aspx) pages to the new syntax. Sys.Silverlight is now just Silverlight, the version is now not longer called 0.95, but 1.1 and enableHtmlAccess has to be set to "true" instead of just true before.

When you get the 2211 error code with Silverlight 1.1 alpha refresh with that nice AG_E_RUNTIME_HTML_ACCESS_RESTRICTED error follow this steps:

• Replace Silverlight.js with the newer version from alpha refresh (you probably have done that already)

• Replace Sys.Silverlight.createObjectEx with Silverlight.createObjectEx in all your .js files

• Also replace all version="0.95" with version="1.1" in all .js files!

• Finally replace enableHtmlAccess: true with enableHtmlAccess: "true"
  This change is very important and will finally get rid of the Html access restricted error above.
  If you like the error, you can "enable" it again by setting enableHtmlAccess to "false" ^^

There are probably much more little changes and fixes, but this should get the simpler pages up and running again.

After VS2008 beta 2 is available now, Silverlight was also updated. For Javascript development the Silverlight 1.0 RC means you are not longer in beta mode and the version will stay the same. For .NET development Silverlight 1.1 is still in alpha, which propably means there are still a lot of features missing, a lot of bugs in there and it is still hard to work with it. However, over 2000 bugs where fixed since the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release 3 months ago.

For Silverlight designers: Blend 2 was also updated to an August CTP, a lot of small improvements here too. The best thing here is the ability to create and compile user controls and some nice changes to the Storyboard editing process.

Download links:

• Silverlight 1.0 RC (for da browser)
  
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh (for da browser)
  
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh SDK (some new samples and updated code)
  
• Blend 2 Preview (August CTP, important for designers)
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for VS2008 Beta 2 (for Alpha Refresh, July 2007)
• Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (July 2007, also kinda important for ASP.NET Ajax and Silverlight)
  

Seen first on:

• http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/
  
• http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2007/07/27/
  silverlight-1-0-rc-and-1-1-alpha-refresh.aspx
  

Scott Guthrie also has a nice blog entry about VS2008 Intellisense improvements, a lot of small improvements, which might impress you if you have never used Resharper and CodeRush before. It is always nice to see the overall coding experience becoming easier, even if it is in small steps.

• Scott Gu's Blog about VS2008 Intellisense
  

Great News, read all about it on Scott Guthries Blog:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/26/
vs-2008-and-net-3-5-beta-2-released.aspx

It features major improvements to ASP.NET Ajax, Linq, the build in Webdesigner and CSS/Javascript.
Seems like nothing for Silverlight yet, still awaiting some updates there :)

Have to check VS 2008 out now ^^

Side note: FX Composer 2 RC1 is out. Check it out, works even better now.

I worked a bit with Silverlight 1.1 (alpha) over the last few weeks and I noticed a lot of annoying
javascript error messages with just stupid error codes and no stack trace for the exceptions.
This is definately the worst thing about Silverlight, you have to do a lot of trial and error testing,
unit testing and debugging silverlight is also hard to do.

I wrote down all the errors I have encountered and some solutions to them, which might be
helpful to other people coding Silverlight too. Now whenever I get an error I just look into this
list and follow the steps from top to bottom and this way I save a lot of time ^^ maybe I will
also rewrite the javascript on_error code that throws these errors to a more useful version.

Silverlight Error Codes:

• 1001: usually AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR (yeah, thats really helpful)

• some element is null while loading a control
  Fix: Check all controls constructors and fields, set breakpoints there!
  

• Namespace duplicate found (usually error code 2254)
  Fix: Check all namespaces, make sure each name and namespace is only set once
  
  
• Control has no default Constructor and can't be instantiated
  Fix: Provide a default constructor with no parameters, it can be empty!
  

• NullReferenceException (or other exceptions) happend somewhere
  (usually in the Control constructor somewhere)
  Fix: Catch the exception or set breakpoints to find it, then fix it.
  Often it is also useful to comment code out and test if it works again.
  
  
• If this all not helps and the 1001 errors keeps coming up when you use the
  control use the following approach:
  
  Fix: Comment out the control, the page should now work.
  Comment it in again and check every single property you set, try removing
  as much as possible and test again. If it still does not work, check out
  the control itself, comment everything out here inside the control canvas.
  It should work now except for some errors of missing inner control names.
  Now slowly comment everything in again and try to see which inner control
  did not work. Often a depreciacted, commented out or deleted property is
  used and causes this error. Again try to work with as little as possible
  control properties and increase until the error pops up again.
  
  This more complex case will hopefully not happen to you in the beginning,
  but the more controls you build, the more likely it is that this one
  will annoy the hell out of you. Keep calm and go forward as methodically
  as possible, it will also help you for future error encounters.
  

• Can happen if a TargetName for a Storyboard (or something similar) cannot
  be found. Make sure the target control name is still valid.
  

• 2005:    ParserError: Unknown namespace xy

• The line should tell you which namespace is unknown and this should
  be quite easy to fix. It usually means you have either forgotten to
  add a namespace or add an element into an unsupported location.
  E.g. adding something to a nested Canvas can sometimes cause this error.
  

• 2024: ParserError:

• Invalid attribute value text/python, usually happens in the main xaml file.
  Similar to 2265, use the same fixes.
  
  
• It can also happen when the mime type
  is not available (e.g. in IIS) and .py files can't be used.
  Fix: Define .py as mime type in IIS as 'text/ironpython'
  

        

• 2101: can be:

• LostFocus event (or similar) not supported here
  Fix: Move global events to the main canvas, they are only supported there!
  

• 2207: AG_E_RUNTIME_METHOD

• playing media failed, unable to play it, loading probably failed with 403
  or 404
  

• 2210: AG_E_INVALID_ARGUMENT

• Short: In 90% of your cases the embedded resource cannot be found, make
  sure that the name of your embedded resource is correct in the
  GetManifestResourceStream function in your control constructor. Also make
  sure the file is marked as an embedded resource in VS Orcas!
  

• This means the embedded resource could not be found, which means either the
  call to GetManifestResourceStream uses the wrong string OR the resource
  is just not existant because of a wrong content type! make sure the
  control you are trying to access is actually an Embedded Resource and not
  just a Content or Silverlight Page.
  
  Fix: Set control xaml as Embedded Resource and make sure all strings are
  correct! GetManifestResourceStream should succeed! Using the Silverlight
  1.1 API UI Controls is also helpful because they figure out the path
  for you (just leaving you with misstyping the control name or forgetting
  to set the embedded resource type or one of the million errors below).
  
  Note: This is very annoying because SourceControl sometimes messes this up
  and just merges 2 files and setting it as Content or Silverlight Page,
  which make this error hard to track, so always check for the correct
  file build action first, it should always be Embedded Resource for controls.
  

• Another way this error can happen is when inside the control a namespace
  error occurs (similar to 1001 or 2254), you just get 2210 and trying to
  find why it does not work while all names are set ok and the resource is
  found, etc. One example of this failing is that a namespace or assembly
  used inside a control to reference other controls cannot be found or is
  misspelled (e.g. path does not longer fit, can be stupid things like
  ClientBin/Some.dll should be ../ClientBin/Some.dll)
  
  Fix: Check all namespaces in the control too, make sure all names are
  correct and files (especially assemblies) can be found the way they
  are specified!
  
  Advanced Fix: I use reflection to find out about the class name and use
  that same name for the .xaml file, this way I never have to specify
  any name and merging files does not lead to problems as long as the xaml
  file has the same name as the class (which is easy to spot in VS Orcas).
  

• Another VERY crazy way for this to happen is when one of your controls is
  using the partial keyword for its control class and overwrites some of the
  autogenerated background fields (through x:Class in the main Canvas of the
  control), it is probably better to always remove the partial and make sure
  the control is all managed by you (like in the SDK samples).
  
  Fix: Remove the partial in c# and the x:Class in xaml if you get compile
  errors, after that it usually just works :)
  

• Older notes (before I figured this out):
  Seems to happen with perfectly fine xaml code, no c# breakpoint is ever
  hit, so this must happen while parsing the xaml. Often also changes to error
  2254 if some name or namespace is wrong, but then gets back to 2210 if that
  is fixed.
  

• Someone here traced the 2210 back to “InitializeFromXaml” being called
  with an invalid resource stream (GetManifestResourceStream), which failed
  one line above it:
  http://silverlight.net/forums/t/1755.aspx
  

    

• 2251: ParserError, AG_E_RUNTIME_MANAGED_ACTIVATION

• Probably a security issue, seems to happen on a Max when the xaml file
  could not be loaded or accesses something that is not available (assemblies)
  Fix: Seems to be a Mac bug, will hopefully be fixed in the future.
  

        

• 2252: can be:

• Canvas Load Error, canvas could not be loaded because something is wrong
  it may help to check out the line and error description for more details.
  Fix: Look through the xaml line by line, annoying, but something is wrong
  

• AG_E_RUNTIME_MANAGED_ASSEMBLY_DOWNLOAD:
  When this happens the control at the line specified failed to load.
  This can be because it crashed somewhere in the constructor, setting a
  breakpoint usually tells you wether it crashed in C# or already in the
  xaml. If it is in the xaml, you have to figure out the error there (try
  to uncomment, check namings, etc.). If it happens in C# setting a
  breakpoint makes it much easier, but the error is still annoying. For
  that reason you should make sure to test your controls as much as
  possible before using them on a complex page.
  
  Fix: Set a breakpoint in the constructor of the control and fix the
  exception! Or if that does not help, take a close look at the xaml
  and comment it out to see what works and what does not.
  

• More help about 2252 from http://silverlight.net/forums/t/370.aspx
  Assembly loading failed, this can happen because of the IIS being
  misconfigured (unlikely if you doing development) or because the
  path to the assembly could not be found (much more likely).
  
  Fix: Make sure both the page xaml and the control xaml point to the
  correct directory for the dll and make sure this works from the
  perspective of the page, not the directories the xaml files are in!
  In my case changing ClientBin/.dll to ../ClientBin/.dll often did
  the trick!
  

• Another issue can happen when you rename the assembly, but not all the
  .dll links are correct. It can also be problematic if there are special
  letters like - in the assembly, which will get renamed to _, but the
  filename is still with -, see here:
  http://silverlight.net/forums/t/370.aspx
  
  Fix: Just check all .dll links and make sure both the name and the path
  are correct.
  

        

• 2254: AG_E_RUNTIME_MANAGER_ASSEMBLY_DOWNLOAD, can be:

• Control type not found because a namespace is not set correctly, this can
  happen if you just copy a file from another project and do not change the
  namespace accordingly.
  Fix: Make sure all namespaces are correct (same in xaml as in the controls)
  
  
• Namespace duplicate found, make sure that all namespaces and names only
  occur once.
  Fix: See above 1001
  

        

• 2255: AG_E_PARSER_BAD_TYPE

• An unsupported type was found, which usually means you are specifying a
  control or class for the xaml, which does not exist (anymore). Make sure
  that the x:Class parameter points to an existing class and uses a correct
  namespace.
  

• Also seems to happen when there are multiple comment blocks mixed in the
  xaml file or some name contains an invalid character because of that.
  Clear the xaml file and test until it works again, then insert the removed
  code again to figure out where the error is happening. The line/position
  information of this error is usually not very helpful!
  

        

• 2265: Error: Parser code

• Parsing xaml failed, this has been reported after saving some xaml in Blend
  but it could not be parsed in Visual Studio.
  Fix: Try using only parts of the xaml, use smaller files, dunno.
  
  
• Parsing xmal failed, some syntax error.
  Fix: You should be able to spot the error and fix it if it is a smaller
  file, for bigger files comment most of it out and comment it back in until
  it breaks again. Then fix the issue.
  

• 3001: AG_E_INVALID_FILE_FORMAT

• Often a ImageError, which usually means you are trying to load an
  unsupported image format like the .GIF format, which is not supported
  by Silverlight yet.
  Fix: Use .PNG instead of .GIF, etc.
  

        

• 3002: AG_E_NOT_FOUND:

• Error type should describe which kind of resource was not found (usually
  ImageError). Check your constructor and Page_Loaded methods and check
  all the files that are loaded there and make sure they exist. This is
  probably the equivalent of FileNotFoundException, just all the helpful
  information (which file, why, etc.) is missing. Sometimes the error type is
  confusing because it may report an ImageError, but in reality just the xaml
  file could not be loaded, always check the xaml file (name, loading, etc.)!
  

        

• 3010: can be:

• Silverlight installation is not complete yet, restart browser (or computer
  if this error persists).
  Fix: Tell user to restart browser.
  

Link to the silverlight.net forum (post this here too), 13 known issues
with Silverlight 1.1. It is good to know them:
http://silverlight.net/forums/t/2400.aspx

Other helpful links:
http://blogs.conchango.com/stevenevans/archive/2007/06/06/
Silverlight-Adventures-with-Blend.aspx
http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread650457.html
http://silverlight.org/forums/t/1422.aspx

Note: I will add more errors to this list for Silverlight 1.1 alpha, but I will probably just
write a new blog entry for newer Silverlight versions. Still pretty excited about the new
VS Orcas Beta 2 release ^^

I wrote a little tool almost a year ago to help me coding XNA directly in VS 2005 instead of using XNA Game Studio Express, which does not support addins. I wrote a little bit about that back then, but for some strange reason I never published my tool. I also wrote about it in my book "Professional XNA Game Programming" in chapter 1 at the end.

Recently I got some emails requesting this tool and I still had to test it for the final XNA version and I also want to add support for VS 2008 (also called orcas; vs 2008 beta 2 comes next week hopefully, yay!).

This tool does not do much, but it is still very useful like the AnnoyingFilesRemover. I use it almost daily when developing and testing XNA projects. It converts projects from VS Express to VS 2005 and VS 2008 and back, you can also use it for VS 2008 (Orcas) projects, which can be openend in VS 2005 again (and compile if you don't use .NET 3.5, but even that works to a certain degree with the LINQ May 2006 CTP). I will try to update this tool when newer versions of XNA (like the XNA Game Studio 2.0) and VS 2008 (like the beta 2 next week) come out, exciting times are ahead :)

The tool looks like this, the most useful button is "Save and Open Project", which convert and then starts the selected VS version:

And here is the installer plus source code:

• XnaProjectChangerSetup.zip (79.76 KB)

• XnaProjectChanger.zip (34.95 KB)

PS: VS2005 and VS2008 both do NOT support the XNA Content Pipeline. I suggest just starting to write XNA games in VS2005/VS2008 and then switch to XNA Game Studio Express when you need and want to use the content pipeline (or use a library in VS2005 and write the game with XNA Game Studio Express).

You can also use the also use the XNA Content Builder to create .xnb files yourself:
http://www.codeplex.com/xnadevru/Wiki/View.aspx?title=XNA%20Content%20Builder%20(XCB)

I've been working with VS Orcas for 3-4 months now and while most projects are still in C#, I switch over to IronPython more and more, especially if I do anything new like some Silverlight website.

CodeRush is working ok in VS Orcas, but there are still some issues, for example expanding/collapsing regions like in my CR_Commenter plugin does not work at all. Visual Studio's Ctlr+M+M and Ctlr+M+L work, but they are pretty much useless because they either collapse just the most inner region (Ctrl+M+M) or just too much (Ctlr+M+L) and pressing these hotkeys is too complicated anyway.

With CR_Commenter you can press Ctrl+4 to collapse or expand the region you are in or Ctrl+5 to collapse/expand all regions (but not summaries, methods, etc.). This works fine in VS 2005, but not in Orcas, there are also some other issues in Orcas like switch or namespace blocks are not commented anymore. For this reason I started writing a new addin (without using CodeRush this time) last month, but I never found time to finish it.

Instead I wrote a new addin this weekend. It just fixes the region issue and adds support for IronPython, which does not have any regions at all. Now regions for all classes, defs (methods) and if blocks are generated for you and can be expanded and collapsed with the same hotkeys (Ctrl+4, Ctrl+5 or the VS defaults). Please note that I had commenter support for IronPython too and added stuff like #region and #endregion to it too, but it does not feel like Python anymore if you add too much comments and blocks. The beauty of Python is its short and self-explaining code and the more I work with it the more I like it.

RegionAddin Hotkeys:

• Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2: Comment code like CR_Commenter (not implemented yet, it is commented out, too much features from CR_Commenter missing).
• Ctrl+3: Build region like CodeRush or CR_Commenter, also commented out, CodeRush's version currently does work much better, but adds comments to #endregion
• Ctrl+4: Collapse or expand the current region you are in
• Ctrl+5: Collapse or expand all regions in the current file. In IronPython it has 3 modes: All uncollapsed, All methods collapsed, All classes and methods collapsed
• Ctrl+6: Regenerate all collapsable blocks in IronPython, this is important because the IronPython language service does not support any collapseable blocks, maybe I will implement that later in there ...
  

Lets take a look at the region feature of RegionAddin for IronPython, Ctrl+6 generate all regions at once, otherwise regions are created automatically as you write code.

As always here is the full SourceCode and a Installer:

•    RegionAddinSourceCode.zip (25.67 KB)
  
  
•    RegionAddinSetup.exe (80.1 KB)
  

This is version 1, I will improve the addin in the future and provide better versions with more features in the future. Maybe I will also finish the CommenterAddin completely and add more support for IronPython (have to think about how it makes sense). Hopefully the RegionAddin is useful for C# and IronPython right now, it also supports all other C style languages like C++.

Yeah! I have been awarded as a MVP (Most Valueable Professional) by Microsoft in the Windows - DirectX Category again.
Last year I got this award and each year it is renewed (or not) if you are still great enough ^^

I guess mainly my XNA projects and the Professional XNA Game Programming book are the reason to become MVP again.
But lately I have not done much DirectX or XNA programming, but questions from my colleagues and by email keep me fit in that area.

A nice warm thank you to all people happy with my work and publications and thanks so much to Microsoft for awarding me again.

If you do not know about FX Composer 2 yet and have not seen it before, check it out if you do any shader development at all. I was a big fan of FX Composer 1 and previewed FX Composer 2 kinda early and used it a bit in the Arena Wars Reloaded OpenGL Shader development.

The best features are full Collada support and full DirectX, OpenGL, FX (hlsl), CG and CGFx support and the nice UI and cool new features and toolboxes. The beta 3 version was released yesterday (first public version) and the final version will probably be available soon.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html#downloads



Mental Mill is also a part of the FX Composer 2 beta 3 installation. It is a really cool tool for artists, who do not want to hand-code shaders themselfes. Instead you can drag and drop components onto the workspace and connect them visually to create a shader. Really cool stuff, one of my artists is really a big fan of shader creation this way. I haven't used it much myself yet, I always end up finetuning the shaders myself.

Mental Mill:

Now this is really good news because I have been working with Orcas for over 2 months now and most of the features of CodeRush did not work in Visual Studio Orcas (even with my hack I posted a few months back). The new version of CodeRush, 2.2.2, finally supports parsing C# 3.0 and has MANY bugfixes and also quite a lot of new features. It was released last month, but I was quite busy and did not notice the update until now (they should implement a rss feed for updates ^^). Refactor! works also great and I might use it more often now (used mostly the refactor features of VS or some other tools in the past). Many thanks fly out to DevExpress, if you look below not many addins have support for Visual Studio Orcas, and CodeRush is best Visual Studio Addin ever, just for this reason alone :)

Because I'm currently developing a addins and even a VS package too (because I develop in IronPython right now, will post on that in a few days), I checked out some other addins. Here is my quick overview:

• CoolCommands 3.0 adds some nice features to VS, mainly to improve interaction between VS, projects and the explorer or command line
  
  
• MZ-Tools is a great addin for Visual Studio I never have heard of before (and I know a lot of addins).  It has a long feature list, check it out yourself ^^ Sadly it does not support VS Orcas yet, but it works nicely in VS2005 and does not override any behaviour of other addins like CodeRush as far as I can tell.
  
  
• CodeIt.Right and CodeIt.Once I have heard of them before, but I never really installed it and check it out. It provides many useful reformating, refactoring and produtivity features, which allow you to quickly add existing code, reformat it automatically and apply rules for all developers on a project. They have also 3 short videos on their website so you can quickly see what this is about. Again no VS Orcas support yet as it seems.
  
  
• SmartOutline is also an addin from the CodeIt.Right guys, they won the 3rd place in the VS Studio Extensibility Contest. All this addin does is add regions, but it is free to download and use. Not sure why this is great, my Commenter plugin could do that 3 years ago and does it in a much faster way (shortcut: Ctrl+3). CodeRush does support it too (Ctrl+R or Ctrl+3 too).
  
  
• TestMatrix for Visual Studio .NET is a unit testing, code coverage and profiling addin. I'm not sure where the profiling comes in (I got Ants Profiler for that, havn't found a better tool yet. But I would like a better tool because Ants Profiler hasn't changed much in 2 years, which suxx), but the code coverage and unit testing features are nice. Probably not worth buying if you use TestDriven.Net like me. Code coverage can also be covered via NCover (a lot of covering in this sentence ^^).
  
  
• Spell Checker is a really useful addin. Like using Word, when the spell checker is there, everything feels right, but when it is missing, it gets very annoying when you need it. I used the SpellChecker for CodeRush from RindHand, but Spell Checker is also very good.
  
  
• Koders Addin for Visual Studio 2005 is also cool, but like most of the plugins, it only works in VS2005, no Orcas support yet. I have installed it for a long time, but I never use it. Dunno why, the idea is great, it allows access to many billion lines of source code and prevents you from re-inventing the wheel.
  
  
• CodeKeep is very similar to Koders, but it focuses on code snippets. I have not used this addin before, but I will try it out, maybe I will use it more often than Koders.
  
  
• I might also have installed 50 million other addins, but I have no time to talk about all of them, most of them are not worth mentioning ^^ In the past I have also talked quite a bit about addins and tools for Visual Studio, including TestDriven.Net, LineCounter, CodeRush, VisualAssist (for C++), CodeSmith and more. They are still great addins, no reason to mention them again, you know them probably already ^^
  

Take care.

Dunno what happened. I wanted to post this a week ago but for some reason I did not find any time to post the whole week. This way I can probably give a more detailed view at the new programs I've been using for one to two weeks now.

BTW: I also updated some links in the menu and on the right side of this website, there were a lot of links not pointing to the correct locations.

First of all, I'm exclusively using Visual Studio Orcas now. I mentioned the Visual Studio Orcas Beta1 a month ago and explained how to import unsupported addins and fix some issues. I did not have much time to check out Silverlight yet, but it still looks very promising. There is also a new website from Microsoft called PopFly that is using it.

Last week one of my colleages was away for a couple of days and I stole his 24" monitor and put it right beside my 24". At that time I was converting a few projects from VS 2005 to VS Orcas, but as you can see that is way too much one the screen. I even tried to rotate both screens by 90 degrees, but after a hour I was feeling silly always looking up and down. Anyway, it is just too much to look at both these screens at once. Having one big 24" and a 20" or 19" right beside it is already a very effective solution. Important stuff goes on the big screen (VS mainly) and all the rest (firefox, ultraedit, explorer, whatever) go on the secondary screen.

This is my normal setup and I'm much more used to that. I have worked with multiple monitors for about 7 years now, it is nothing special anymore, but now is the first time I don't really need a bigger monitor anymore ^^




Ok, let's go on with some tools. I downloaded FreeMind a month ago and played around with it a little, but it couldn't convince me to replace my good old txt TODO list. But for other stuff FreeMind is really great.



In a matter of seconds you can create a overview design and it has the advantage to put it directly into a project instead of having it on paper, never been able to add stuff and losing it after a short while. Here is one of the FreeMind maps I have recently created just describing a project design and the workflow process. I have also seen examples of complete project management with FreeMind or using it for TODO lists or scheduling, but I'm not convinced that you are faster with it. I do not really need a graphical view of my TODO list, at least not at the time I throw ideas and tasks in there. To view the work process I could still convert my TODO list (which is tree based) to FreeMind anyway. It is just faster entering text into a text file than to anything else (which is also the main reason I never found any good TODO list tool).




Then on the recent DotNetRocks radio show I heard Eric Sink from SourceGear talking about Source Control and his tool SourceGear Vault, which is very similar to SourceSafe. This year I went crazy and tried all kinds of source controlling systems, including the following:

• 
  SubVersion (successor of CVS): SubVersion is a really great version control system and it works really good, both on small and big projects. We have used it for Arena Wars Reloaded and the only cavecat was getting it to work inside Visual Studio 2005. Thanks to the plugin VisualSVN it worked out just fine, only adding files is a real hassle (they are not added to the remote server, just locally). For VS Orcas there is no support and when you are working with ASP.NET websites in VS SubVersion and VisualSVN is a really bad choice IMO because it messes up the directories and does not add the files properly.
  
  
  
• 
  Perforce: Ok, I went back to Perforce, which I had used before, but mostly alone or together with another programmer. Perforce is a very professional solution, but again not very practical for anything but programmers and I wanted to include the graphic artists and project managers into the version control system too. Also Perforce still has a lot of issues with Visual Studio IMO and is still hard to setup, even with the much improved UI that finally allows you to set rights properly without messing in command line scripts. Again, no support for VS Orcas and the main reason not to use Perforce is the crazy price, $800 per developer, good bye! It was a lot cheaper a few years ago, but I never got into Perforce (mostly used SourceSafe in the past).
  
  
  
• 
  SourceSafe: Ok, back to the basics. The good old SourceSafe with an internal file system that no one understands, strange bugs that prevent you from adding files or the good old "If you delete a file, it is still there, just the content is gone"-"feature". For smaller projects SourceSafe is fine and if you do not have many developers, it works ok, but you can't give it to any graphic artist and once something gets messed up you need to spend a lot of time cleaning it up. The good thing is it works right out of the box in Visual Studio Orcas.
  
  
  
• 
  And then I tried SourceGear Vault: It is pretty much the same thing as SourceSafe, it just uses a SQL DB backend, has a much cleaner interface and much better tools including nice importers to get all your projects converted into the new version control system (yeah, everyone says they have importer, but they never work, the Vault Importer worked, it had no problem importing several GB of SourceSafe data). The disadvantage might be that it still feels like SourceSafe and it still has some of its issues (like deleting files and they appear again as 0-byte files), but overall it is much improved. We have just used it for a few days now and we had one merge problem so far, but that was probably because one artist did not check in his files and we changed it a few times. Vault also runs fine on VS Orcas as it probably just uses the standard SourceSafe interface for most of its stuff, which runs just fine on VS 2005 and Orcas.
  
  
  
• 
  I also tried a couple of other version control systems, but none of them worked in VS Orcas and I did not find a great one anyway. Some tools like AlienBrain have really nice features, but too much other stuff is missing and while it might be a great tool for artists, it is unusable for programmers. I do not believe in having separate version control systems, especially if you work tightly with your artists and make 10+ check ins per day with them.

I also use another tool called OnTime (Ship Software OnTime) for a while now. It is a project management tool and we use it mainly for bug tracking. It is about 700 times better than having you bug tracker on a stupid website. Website bug trackers like Mantis or BugZilla are not good for quickly adding tasks, entering bugs and fixing them in my opinion. They might be useful if you have to work with remote teams or if you expect really detailed bug reports. In our case we have mostly short tasks and quick bug reports, which are written in a few seconds.
But more importantly OnTime integrates directly into Visual Studio (sadly not VS Orcas, but the Windows tool on a secondary screen is fine too). It allows you to quickly add tasks for yourself or for any team mate and to go though 20 bugs in a few minutes (you will never be that fast with a website system). But the best feature IMO is the email management, OnTime allows you to send emails to a specific email address, which get picked up and added to the bug list. Then the programmer sees the issue, fixes it and the email sender gets a reply that the bug has been fixed. This system worked out great in our company.


For some strange reason I can't make screenshots with PrintScreen in Windows anymore. I guess some VNC tool messes up my clipboard or Windows just does not want to handle screenshots as big as my monitor resolution is. I searched for a good screenshot capture tool because I was getting annoyed with the PrintScreen+Paste in Paint or similar+Save somewhere on disk approach anyway. I used a tool a few years back that automatically made screenshot of the desktop every minute or so, which was funny, but I can't remember the name anymore. After testing a couple of crappy freeware and shareware programs I finally found Screenshot Captor, which is freeware and a really good tool with a lot of cool features. Most importantly, it allows you to capture your screen, window, or all screens with PrintScreen, Alt+PrintScreen or Ctrl+PrintScreen and it even safes the screenshot in the format you want into a directory you want. This was exactly what I needed :)

And finally to finish this big monster post: Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II is in the making and I was totally blown away by this. Many sites like GosuGamers.Net reported all week and were guessing StarCraft II or Diablo III, but there were so many rumors about StarCraft II, not many people were very sure of it anymore.



There are already some screenshots and game infos available, you can also find a few game play videos on youtube and 2 trailers by blizzard are on the official StarCraft II website, which is painfully slow by the way ^^ The game looks pretty good, but it still has many similarities with WarCraft III and there was already a lot of critics by pro-gamers and people in the StarCraft communities fearing that this game would be slower and less balanced than the original. I suspect the same, but StarCraft II will still be the best RTS that comes out in the next couple of years and every RTS fan will buy it anyway.

If it can surpass StarCraft - BroodWar is not for sure yet and we have to wait and see. It will probably attract more people to the StarCraft universe, but the old StarCraft community will not die that fast. It probably will take another 1-2 years until the game is done anyway. But this was very amazing news for me, I was suspecting Diablo III or some MMORPG from Blizzard, but not a PC-only old-school singleplayer+multiplayer game, that really goes back to the roots and just adds 3D graphics and physics to it. Nice job Blizzard!

Today I got the Wired Magazine in my mail and on site 80 there is a nice article about the development process of the XNA Challenge game Dungeon Quest from the GDC 2007. It was written by Mary Jane Irwin from the Wired Games Blog, thanks :). There is also a nice picture gallery with 21 images from the 4 days, which nicely shows the advancements we made each day. Enjoy!

PS: There is probably more information on this and other XNA projects on the huge Wired.com website, but every time I search for XNA or my name, I just find too many articles. Test for yourself.

I heard about all the Silverlight fuss from the MIX2007 conference last week, but I did not have time to check it out with all the stress and projects I'm currently involved in. I already use VS Orcas for a while (see post from last month) and I played around with WPF in the past (formerly Avalon, now Silverlight, which is still in beta, but will be released this summer finally), but I did not find anything compelling for a game programmer since we use DirectX or XNA anyway. But with the ability to build websites with Silverlight and still allowing the .NET framework to exist in that environment while simplifying the development process and getting away from building static html like pages with some dynamic features (ajax or not, it is still somewhat static and hard to do), Silverlight gets much sexier than just WPF on a windows app by itself.

Why is Silverlight cool? It is .NET, it runs on Firefox, IE, Safari, Mac, etc. it is just 2 MB download, it is amazingly fast, it has many cool new features, it allows many windows-only apps to be developed for the browser in a more natural way, it will be pushed like crazy and a lot of people will have it till the end of this year, there are already some cool tools out there including the Expression toolkit and Visual Studio Orcas, and probably a lot of other reasons you can checkout yourself!

Maybe it is even possible to interop with some DirectX or XNA stuff somehow. I have no idea if this is possible at all or if there are security issues or this kind of functionality is not possible at all, but instead of waiting for another week until I find a few minutes to test this out, why not announce it here first that this would be cool and maybe someone else can test it for me :)

Even for just doing websites, Silverlight will definitely become a BIG competitor to Flash based websites, developing in .NET will be a lot easier than working with Flash/Actionscript/whatever and I would bet that there are more VB/C# developers that can now do some great websites without having to learn much while creating Flash sites or even doing ASP.NET (with or without Ajax) development is much harder and less compelling for certain kinds of applications. Great examples are the FOX Movies site and some widgets on MSDN or some early test controls from Telerik.

BTW: Archor wrote me an email about his Cyber Car XNA game he wanted to submit to the XnaProjects.Net site I made last week. This is actually a Racing Game Mod, I first guessed he used the simple racing game version, but this one is based on the full racing game from the XNA creators website. Pretty cool style in my opinion. Thanks Archor!

http://xbox360.archor.com/

Yes. My XNA book is finally out and some people even got an early version last week. There is also some discussion going on in the XNA Forums and on the official Wrox forum for the book.

The coolest thing yesterday that my book was on Rank #16 for Computer/Technical books on Amazon.com and on Rank 500 something for all books. Quite impressive if you ask me, hopefully it will continue to stay high and make me filthy rich .. just kidding.

Yesterday I wanted to put all the samples from the book on my blog, but it is already way to overloaded here with screenshots and games, adding another 10 games will not make anything better. Instead I had a crazy idea to create a XNA Community site in one day. It is called XnaProjects.Net. The idea is for everyone to submit their games and links. News are grabbed with Google Blog Search and more features will come in July 2007 when I got more than 5 minutes time in a row.

Anyway, check out this great new website, submit your games and links and check out whats already submitted by me (10 Games so far, yes, thats a lot of XNA games I did in the past few months):

• XNA Pong
• XNA Breakout
• XNA Tetris
• Rocket Commander XNA
• XNA Shooter
• XNA Racing Game
• SimpleRacingGame
• SpeedyRacer
• Dungeon Quest
• Skinning with Collada Models in XNA

You can find source code and game installers for all of these games, including some nice screenshots and a YouTube video for each of them on the XnaProjects.Net website. Check it out:

This year we had no booth on the CeBIT and there were no important meetings for us there, so I just ran across the CeBIT yesterday with a couple of friends and I took a lot of photos. Here are my impressions from the CeBIT 2007, I hope you enjoy it.

Let's get started. This is the train ride to the west entrance. It will not be that empty on the way back.

The CeBIT fair ground (photo was taken a little bit later). There were about 25 filled halls with a lot of exhibitors and over 200 000 expected visitors.

The first booth we saw. Not really spectacular, but we started with some boring halls in the beginning and left the entertainment halls for the end.

RFID chips are used to track packages here. The sensors in the front are used to check if a package has left or entered a storage facility.

Heise.de had a booth too and we saw a couple of Linux penguins in that hall too. The usual get 2 CT editions for free abo could be ordered here too. They also had a Sony Play station 3 running Linux on the other side. The funniest thing was some other booth in that hall where some woman announced that you can win a "Sony Play 3 Station ". We laughed our asses off.

Some Chebaba dude or chick was handing out candy.

The big companies SAP and Microsoft almost filled the whole hall 5 together.

Microsoft did not have anything new to show because most of its products have been released in the past months. It will take another 2-3 years for the next cycle. There were only some smaller handheld devices with Windows XP (like the Origami from last year) that looked interesting and a lot about boring business and security. I would have liked to see some info about Longhorn Server.

An Asian woman wanted to take this Audio sport car with her.

This is the data storage server for the whole Microsoft booth. There are 2 rack servers in here and about 24 disk drives. Some guy from Microsoft came over and explained to us that the server got 4 TB data storage and runs several services, all Windows based. But we smiled a little thinking of our little server at home, which is just a normal PC running Windows 2003 x64 (you will need that for any drive bigger than 2 TB), but got 4 TB on a single RAID 5 already, with some other backup and boot drives too. And it is not as noisy as the servers we saw here at the CeBIT.

Some cool relaxing chairs near the AMD business booth. There were a lot of water fountains in hall 1 and 2.

Another server with about 64 disk drives running a Windows Cluster service and there were showing virtualization here and explained how cool it is to have multiple virtual servers, which can balance each other. I did not wanted to spoil them by telling them that using virtual servers will just throw away almost 50% of your performance away. Using it for performance critical applications did not make much sense to me. Again, just 6.1 TB on this data server, not much if you ask me. In a few years everyone will have more memory on their home computers ^^

A blue haired girl at the ASUS booth. I was not sure if she is really from ASUS as she was handing out something to win some Intel stuff. Later I found out all the blue haired girls were from Intel and they were at 8 different booths, which you had to visit to win something boring. I would guess the total number of people how did that was zero. BTW: Did I mentioned that my mainboard that stopped working last week when I came back from the GDC was from ASUS? :-(

A Porsche! There was a PC inside, but for some reason the car was more exciting (and expensive). You could even get a price if you ask, but you know, when you have to ask, you can't afford it anyways.

Racing games all over the place. Why does everyone going to a fair want to play racing games? And why does everyone just show racing games? Man, this is boring! Ups, I did a racing game too, maybe I should be more exciting about this ...

The Samsung booth in hall 1. Samsung is a cool company anyways with all their support for e-sports and their range of cool affordable products, but everyone at this booth was extremely friendly. Most other booth in hall 1 were just focused on business and did not even want to be asked about anything.

A new laptop, which got the new Nvidia GeForce 8000 Go card in it. Coming out in 1-2 months. Pretty exicting. Makes my new laptop with a GeForce 5900 GS look much less impressive.

Here are the specs. If even such a small laptop can have a GeForce 8000 and do DirectX 10 stuff, bigger laptops will have some cool graphic boards too in the future.

The new 30 inch screen from Samsung. It has a better image than the 30 inch Dell, but it is still very expensive and the Dell monitors are much more affordable (especially the 24 inch). The resolution on a 30 inch is great: 2560x1600 ^^

Some guy was zooming in on girls with this new camera, but I was watching the watcher.

Two girls from Intel (again and again, they were all over the place) checking out each other. Not really hot, but getting to it ..

A sphere of monitors at the very unfriendly IBM booth. They had some business people explain the marketing ideas of IBM in Second Live, but they had no idea about the application and their "sims" were empty like no ones else. But who cares, as long as people keep pumping money into "3D worlds and presentations" they will keep going. IMO the Second Life technology is not really perfect for virtual presentations. There is no easy way to login and most of the required technology is not even implemented yet (Second Live does not even have voice support).

This is how the sphere monitors are controlled by the way. Each one has a laptop on its back. I'm not sure this is the best way to do it, but we are still on the IBM booth, no reason to be clever here.

A little later we saw Commodore. Every year someone new buys the name and brings out a couple of shitty products, when will it ever stop? For example they got some "new" 4GB mp3 players with some simple display, which costs 250 bucks. By the way, other companies like Samsung and Creative had similar shitty mp3 players and marketed them as "new" too. The walkman was something new, but everything after that is pretty much the same. I just do not get the point when people start speaking about "taking your music anywhere with you". Are you freaking kidding me?

For that you get a Zune or iPod with 30GB and much better technology. I got a Zune from the GDC by the way and it does not work here in Germany yet. First of all you are not allowed to download or pay for anything when you are not in the US or Canada (the only countries where the Zune is released yet), and then you can't even install the Zune software on a German operating system. There are some hacks to get around some issues and having direct access to the Zune drive (very useful), but they only work on a English windows version or XP. Here is the link if you are in the same trouble.

Did you notice that no booth chicks will look at me when I'm trying to take a picture? I will keep trying till the end of the day ^^ Please also note that we entered the entertainment halls and everything will look more like the Games Convention now.

An Asian RPG game, which has a really cool kill counter in the lower right. The game looked very manga like, but still had realistic graphics. I have to check back what this game was about later.

R2D2 was there too. Actually it was a pretty cool robot that is already available in Japan and it has cameras, can move around and it can blink and beep like the "real" one from the movies.

Hmm, this might look like a completely empty booth, but actually the very exciting dude there was showing invisible devices. Amazing, isn't it?

More cases and a lot of different displays on them. They all cost around 40 bucks, which is not much for computer cases anymore and the quality gets better and better.

The World Cyber Games 2007 Euro Championship was in hall 23 of the CeBIT. But it only was played from the 15. to the 18. March and it was all over when we were going into the hall.

Holy macaroni. This girl from Razer was throwing something at me while I was taking this picture. We could maybe count that as a girl looking at me while I'm taking a picture, but she was out to get me. This does not count, let's go on. And no, I did not catch the bandage.

AMD and ATI (also AMD) were in hall 23 too. Try to find the laptop facing in the wrong direction on this picture!

A cool Formula One racing car, which reminds me of the Speedy Racer Mod of the Racing Game. Ups, I already said too much ...

The ATI chick "Ruby" looks good as always.

And some cool water cooled gear with AMD stuff in it.

And finally some mainboards with AMD chipsets on a wall. Not sure if I would agree with AMD's new slogan "Smarter Choice" as they are currently very much behind the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and the Nvidia 8800 GPUs are also much faster than their ATI counterparts!

At the XFX booth the famous Quake world champion "Fatality" was playing against random people. Those two police girls where protecting the gamer area. Some people even wanted be be arrested .. strange people these gamers.

And another picture of those two nice girls. They had to be alert all the time, so I'm ok with them not noticing me taking pictures.

And this is Fatality playing against some random guy. They were playing Quake 4. The announcer had a pretty boring job:
00:00: The match begins ..
00:06: 1 to 0 for Fatality already
00:10: 2 to 0 for Fatality
..
00:36: 8 to -1 for Fatality ..
etc.

Oh no, we are at the Games Convention, aren't we? Just for a t-shirt everyone is going crazy again!

Now that is a pretty cool mouse. Mine can not do anything like that, I'm happy when it even works at all.

More cases, much more cases!

Power supplies and cases, almost like in a computer shop, just the prices are missing.

In hall 24 we saw a lot of hardware vendors, mainly for mainboards, graphic cards, power supplies and coolers. Zalman has really grown big. They got so many new products.

They do not only have coolers, power supplies and water cooling systems, but also cases like this one: The Z-Machine!

G.Skill memory. DDR3 and faster memory with 900Mhz, 1000+ MHz and more coming soon.

A pretty cool looking server mainboard for 2 CPUs and 16 memory slots, uffa!

Something is missing here? A nicely build PC with corsair ram and LEDs on them is there. A keyboard is there too and even speakers, but where the hell does the gamer look at? At a white wall?

DDR3 memory is coming. No, it is nothing really new, graphic cards have that already, but now the big memory sticks for the mainboards are going to be faster too. Also notice the cool looking cooler and the 8800 GTX build in here. I guess it is a Core 2 Duo system too, probably the X6800, which is still very expensive. The prices will drop in April however. Exciting times to come.

More stuff from Gigabyte. The hall was filled with hardware vendors, but we were tired and had not much power left walking through every single booth. For a more complete view about the halls 23-25 check out Guru3D's review of the CeBIT 2007. They have a lot of cool pictures too and more technical details.

HAH! Another Intel chick and this time I got her just as she was quickly moving forwad. Not only did I get her sharply while the world around her blurs away, she is also looking at me and smiling. Mission accomplished for today.

Professor Intel explains why everyone needs a X6800 quad core CPU for games today, when over 95% of all games do not even care if you have two cores. But still, even a single core from a Intel Core 2 system is much faster than anyone else can give you.

More cases .. Wasn't Apogee the software publisher behind Commander Keen and older jump and run games? That logo does look quite different.

Some big piece of cooling equipment. Not sure if that even fits in a normal desktop. But it is all passive and while mainboards are cooled passively too and the power supplies are very silent the only noisy part in your PC will probably be the hard discs. Haven't seen silent ones of those in a long time.

More cases .. and what the heck. Another girl is looking? The day can end now. It was not all that bad, but most pictures I took where blurry and when I gone through the photos I have selected for this post, I saw that all the girls from the first half were looking away ^^

Oh no, this poor guy just wanted to take a closer look at these half naked chicks and now he is in real trouble. I better keep going.

And there is the reason to buy a 1000W power supply (e.g. the Galaxy one from Enermax). Ok, you need about 24 hard discs, 4 CPUs and 2 8800 GTX graphic cards to even get to 933W, but does not everyone have such a PC at home? The raid controller here is looking cool, just 6 ports which 4 sata cables coming out of it. I did not know the vendor (BMC or something), but other RAID controller suppliers like Highpoint had similar cards too.

That's it for me. Time to get some rest. Next big fair will be the Games Convention in Leipzig in August, but there are a few smaller conferences till then and I will keep shooting photos

I originally wanted to finish this at Monday or Tuesday, but I had not enough time this week to improve much on the Dungeon Quest game. Many of the cool features of the game were already implemented in some unit tests at the GDC like splitscreen support and shadow mapping, but we had not time to test and finetune all that. There were also a lot of bugs and smaller issues in the beta version. Below is a long list of all changes and some new screenshots. When the XNA Update is available that allows deploying to the Xbox 360 with just binaries I will provide an updated version that runs on the Xbox 360 too and supports splitscreen multiplayer gaming.

Download the game installer here (40 MB): DungeonQuestSetup.zip
Alternative download (slow! from this site): DungeonQuestSetup.zip

Note: This game requires a Shader Model 3.0 GPU as it was build for the Xbox 360 and optimized that way. For lower end PCs it pushes way too many polygons each frame anyway so that it will be too slow. If you have a low end SM 3.0 GPU (like the Nvidia GeForce 6600), make sure you run in a lower resolution (see below for details).

Here is a little video from the current version of the game. Enjoy!

Screenshots:

Ok, let's get started. What is this guy doing there. He doesn't look very friendly, maybe it is better to hit him in the head!

First quest completed. This key is important to open the door to the second level.

Nonstop fighting action. Well, at least if you don't lose your way.

This is how it looks like after I got angry. I told those guys, don't start any fights!

Ohh no. I did not use all my skills (see right side) and this Ogre killed me too quickly. I guess I have to start over.

The credit screen when the game ends. Notice my book :)

No reason to stop, let's start over and try again. The fight is continuing. The game is not that hard, you just have to use all skills and avoid being hit by fireballs or big enemies when you have low hit points.

Improvements:

• Improved performance a lot by optimizing some internal code and using all ps3.0 shaders now (sad thing is it only runs with ps3.0 hardware now).
  TIPP: If you have a low spec ps3.0 graphic card (like the GeForce 6600 or lower) use a smaller resolution, the game will run much faster. Use the DungeonQuestSettings.xml file and enter a smaller resolution there (e.g. 800x600). The game is heavily GPU bound (like all my games) and it pushes several million polygons each frame (scene alone has almost a million polygons, but it has to be rendered 3 times for all shadow mapping and post processing effects). Runs on XBox 360 or GeForce 7x hardware very good with 100fps and more.
• Fixed parallax mapping for the cave and improved the specular effects, looks much nicer now. Also increased view distance and light affect range.
• Improved the music and sound effects, also added a lot more events and little sounds.
• Added many text messages to help the player understand the game better
• Check if computer can do ps 3.0, else shows big message on screen.
• Support for 64 bit systems (did not start before)
• Reduced glow in post screen (see comments of beta version)
• Fixed game logic and quests (did not work at all in the beta)
• All game actions get a nice message now in the center (killed ogre, got key, quest complete, new weapon, etc.)
• Implemented several new animations for hitting and dying
• Fixed text size in 3:4 resolutions (did only look correct in 16:9)
• Improved gravity (much stronger now) and fixed several collision bugs
• Fixed collecting key, added it to the UI and also allowing dropping weapons now
• Allow switching weapons (right/left shoulder buttons or Q/E or Mouse wheel)
• Selected enemy ring to help you see which enemy is attacted
• Rumble Xbox 360 controller when hit/getting hit
• Added end screen and credits with book link, credits
• Improved weapons, damages and made the game more balanced.
• Show high score list when game over
• Mouse support for dungeon quest (shooter like, just asdw for moving)
• Block door when we don't got key! Also added sphere collision for monsters (they don't intersect anymore)
• Fixed shadow mapping and added a lot of cool shadow effects and pseudo point light sources.
• Added nice looking vista compatible icon, also tested the whole game on vista, runs fine :)
• Added some grunt sounds and an ambient theme in the background!
• And many more ..

The source code is not yet released. I will probably work a little bit more on on when the XNA Update comes out and then maybe release it. Sorry for now, I know many people want to take a look right now ^^

Here are some more pictures from the last few days of the GDC. We did not have enough time to go through all the pictures in the last days.

Chris and me are currently working on the last issues with Dungeon Quest, an updated version will be finished soon.


This was at the beginning of Day 3, when we still got over 14 hours left. You can see our sign from the XNA Challenge and a little sign for my upcoming book :)

The Lobby of the Moscone North Building, which was also the XNA Lobby and the place we stayed all day to finish our game. The Gears of War theme music was getting annoying after hearing it a few times, but after hearing it for 4 straight days I guess I need a few weeks of silence before I can ever play Gears of War again ^^

Two of the other teams working hard on their XNA games.

Gabe Ahn from Sony introducing us at the COLLADA round table I was speaking at on Wednesday (left to right): Shaun Leach from Zipper Interactive, Ken Normann from EA (working on the Sims team) and me (some XNA guy from exDream in Germany? ^^)

The panel discussion was good IMO, hopefully more and more people get attracted to COLLADA and start using it for their tools.

The outside world at day 4, it might not look very bright to you, but after 2 days with just 2-3 hours of sleep this looked incredible bright and it was hard to open the eyes out here. But the weather was nice all week and it was warm enough to wear t-shirts all the time except at night.

A picture from Microsoft's XNA Party at Thursday evening. It was still early and we prepared our presentation of the XNA game we did in 4 days: Dungeon Quest. We had many problems in the last two days and just skipped some of our features, but we got it done and it looks really good, especially for the short time frame we had to develop the game.

Christoph and me standing proudly in front of our game at the XNA Party. Many people came and played and congratulated us on the great result.

One final picture from Saturday morning before we were leaving to the airport to head back to Germany. The trip was 25 hours for me and after that I felt as tired as Friday, I probably need to sleep for a week now .. but I got work to do ..

Sorry for not blogging yesterday. We were working all day on our game here on the GDC 2007 and it was very noisy and distracting here. If you want to watch us work: We are in the Moscone North Lobby and shouldn't be hard to find. Anyway, I will probably just blog at the morning of the next day for each day here.

Our game is called Dungeon Quest and we are absolutely insane because we want to create a Multiplayer Role Playing Game in just 4 days and we haven't even thought of all the distractions here. I will try to give you a screen per day and tell you want we have done so far.

Yesterday we worked purely on the environment, the level and the general game idea and some smaller details. As I said before we started with nothing, I just created a new project and Christoph did just open up 3DS Max and started working, there are no textures or models we have already done. And we both have never worked on a role playing game before.

In the morning we still had a lot of problems getting our computers up and running (3DS Max wasn't starting, I needed lots of plugins and tools, stuff like that). It usually takes a day or more to set up a development machine in our opinion. Probably a week until you got all the important tools installed you forgot in the first day. Anyway, we finally started to build the cave, create new custom collada exporter for that and placed lights. While Christoph was working on the 3D cave I was getting the engine up and running and noticed that there are many things that have to be done:

• Like just rendering some text on the screen,
• Finding a good font for that,
• Creating a bitmap font,
• Also making other UI elements (selected monster, health, level up, etc.)
• Rendering shaders and playing around with point lights
• Working on many other smaller issues like effects, billboards, vertex formats, etc.
• Most unit tests require a good camera and testing the cave level itself was very hard, so I already created the ThridPersonCamera class we going to use for this game.

I started with most classes that are required for that and I also could drop in some Texture/Font code from Rocket Commander XNA, but most of the shader and collada import classes had to be created from scratch. Then we spend all evening and even this morning tweaking the shaders, getting all the lights working, adding fog, figuring out how to do 6 complex light passes in one shader, and so on.

Today we will focus on building the main character, getting some collision detection working and some basic game logic (keys, doors, monster state machines, player behaviour and animations). Hopefully I can provide you with a nicer screenshot tomorrow, just an empty level is pretty boring.

And here are some pictures from yesterday for your enjoyment.

This is the lobby of the Moscone North building at the GDC. The GDC Expo hall is below us and on Monday the Serious Games Summit was here, but we hadn't had any time to even check out who is speaking at the actual GDC. At wednesday I will be at some Collada round table speaking about Collada and issues we had with it so far ^^

There are many art galleries here in San Francisco and the Asian population is also huge. It was not hard to find an Asian Art Gallery.

Here you can see an ad for Microsoft's Vista Operating System directly in front of the big Mac building here (seems a lot of people got one here). There is nothing interesting about a Mac for a game developer IMO.

Alcatraz at day time. I already showed you a picture at night earlier.

A view from my desk at the Hotel over San Francisco. Its still impressive every day you wake up ^^

And some picture of a place I don't know the name of. Usually I would look it up, but I have to go back to work. Cya tomorrow!

We arrived yesterday in San Francisco, but we were to tired to upload all the pictures we made (or Christoph made, I just watched him take photos ^^ my cell camera is not that good). But today we got a free day till the GDC, which starts tomorrow. Here you go, enjoy!

Let's go, this is Germany at night, very exciting, isn't it? We started our journey at 4:20 am

If you have read my blog before you already know how the Hanover Airport and Amsterdam airports look like. We did not take much pictures there anyway. The plane ride was long as usual (11 hours alone from Amsterdam to San Francisco) and it was a really long day (~33 hours). This was our plane, a pretty big Boeing 767.

We arrived at our hotel at 3:00 pm and were pretty amazed about the 36 floors.

But then we saw this room. There must be something wrong, we are not the President. The registration gave us the wrong key to a conference room, but we stayed there for a while, took pictures and enjoyed the room and bar ^^

Our rooms were not bad either, pretty nice view over San Francisco.

Our Hotel (The Argent) from below.

And a view over San Francisco at the evening. We spotted the Golden Gate Bridge (right from this picture) and the Alcatraz Island.

And finally San Francisco at night. We were pretty tired by now and I still had to install stuff on my laptop, after merging the 2 HDDs all my data was lost and I had to download and install everything again, but at least the HDDs are faster now (yeah, Raid 0 kamikaze). The Chinese had some parade below us and made some noise, but we were very tired and went to sleep early.

More pictures tomorrow.

                  

Every year in march the GDC is San Francisco or San Joe and we all are reading the announcements, papers and articles coming from there. It was always interesting to read about the stuff going on there (gamedev.net has a good coverage each year), but I could never attend. The cost of flying over there and staying there for a week plus the incredible high attendee fees kept me out of this conference in the past. As you can read on www.exDream.com we usually attend the CeBIT here in Hannover instead and go to all the other conferences and fairs here in Germany ^^

Anyway, a few weeks ago Microsoft asked me to come to the GDC and be part of one of their XNA "Dream Team"s. The idea for these teams is to build a game while we are on the conference in 3-4 days (from Monday to Thursday) and that sounds crazy enough for me (who the hell wants to make a game in 3-4 days? and how?).

There will be a big party Thursday night and all the XNA games will be presented there. Some information about that can be found on the XNA Team Blog.

My idea was to create one of the most complex game types there is: A multiplayer roleplaying game. And yes in just 3 days and starting from scratch ^^
It will probably be a little like Zelda, but we are focusing our efforts on creating one cool looking level and with some enemies and maybe a few quests. Everyone I told this idea said the same thing you are thinking right now: Impossible. Yeah, I know, but it is fun anyway to try. Hopefully we will come up with something good looking till Thursday then.

I will blog every day with screenshots and the daily development process directly from the GDC and you can see how far we get. My friend Christoph Rienaecker (WAII) is also coming with me and helping me out modeling the player and enemies as well as the level so I can focus on programming

If you are also attending the GDC and want to meet with me, drop me an email or write in the comments. See ya there, or not ^^ but as usual I will make pictures and document my experiences for all of you who won't attend.

Don't ask me how I managed to not post anything this week. My plan was certainly different, but I didn't want to post my problem with this little project too early. To make up with the lack of blog posts this year until now this is going to be a very long and hopefully very useful article

Content

• Video, Screenshot and Downloads
• Introduction and why Collada?
• Class Overview
• Loading collada files
• Problems with the animation data
• Optimizing vertices
• Optimizing the Optimization
• Adjusting the shaders for skinned meshes
• Post screen shaders for the final result
• References and Links

Video, Screenshot and Downloads

First of all, here is a video for the project I'm talking about here:

Screenshot of the same scene (better quality since youtube videos just suck quality wise):

Before you start reading this article I suggest you download the executable and source code first in case you want to try it out directly while reading. The whole project is based on the RocketCommanderXNA engine and just adds the ColladaModel.cs class, which does all the amazing stuff you see in the video The video above shows shadowing from the XNA Shooter engine, which is not yet released and their fore not included in the downloads. The rest of the code is the same, just the shadow map rendering was removed. More details about shadow mapping in XNA can also be found in my book (plug plug plug ^^).

• The source code is about 2.6 MB and contains projects for XNA Game Studio Windows and the Xbox platform, as well as a project for Visual Studio 2005. It was tested on Windows XP and Vista 32 and 64 bit as well as on the Xbox 360.
  SkinningWithColladaModelsInXnaSourceCode.zip (2.6 MB)
• The executable contains the output (32 bit Windows, but runs on 64 bit and Vista too) from the project in case you just want to try it out or do not have XNA Game Studio Express installed yet. You still need the XNA Framework for this program, download it here, if you do not have it installed yet! You also need a Shader Model 2.0 capable graphic card.
  SkinningWithColladaModelsInXnaExecuteable.zip (2.5 MB)
  
  Update 2007-02-26: Fixed time steps, in release mode with more than 200-300 fps the animation was getting too slow. Now works flawless :)
  

Please note that the 3D Goblin Model was created by my friend Christoph Rienaecker (WAII) and if you want to use it, please credit him (see Readme.txt). The source code and collada loading class can be used freely too, but I want some credits too (at least in the source code ^^).

Introduction and why Collada?

OK, let's get started. I talked a lot about the XNA Content Pipeline and its problems on my blog, and in several recent interviews and also in my upcoming XNA book. For projects like Rocket Commander or even the Racing Game it was sometimes a little bit annoying, but I could do everything I needed by loading X files and adding some features to it to fix the tangents, load the correct shader techniques, etc.
However XNA does not support loading animation data or gives you a way to display them. You have to do all that work by yourself. This includes static mesh animations (like it was used in Rocket Commander, I just left it out in Rocket Commander XNA), but also skeletal animation with bones and skinned meshes.

There is a nice project on CodePlex called XNA Animation Component Library, but it only support FBX and ASCII X files (and recently BVH, ASF and AMC formats) and I could not get any of my test models to work with this library. The main thing missing here is good shader support and it also has a lot of problems with complex animated models. Other than that exporting 3D Models as X files is really a pain in the ass, no matter which exporter you use (Panda Exporter for 3dsMax was good a year ago, I still use it, now kiloWatt X file Exporter for 3dsMax is better, and the Microsoft X File Exporter for Max always sucked). Simple models might work, but the more complex 3D models get and the more meshes and animation data is stored in a scene, the more problems you will have. Sometimes it is not possible to reconstruct everything correctly on your importer side.

Anyway, at the very beginning of the Racing Game development there was no content pipeline in XNA (it was Beta 1) and I implemented loading 3D Models with help of the collada file format, which is basically just XML and very easy to read. For that reason it was relatively simple to get some 3D data loaded and displayed in the early XNA versions with help of vertex buffers. There were some problems with shader settings and I had to try many different exporters and ended up with the one from Feeling Software. Back then it had still some problems loading shaders and using the correct techniques, but the recent version (3.0.2) is much better and works like a charm.

After Microsoft had implemented the content pipeline and made it possible to load X and FBX files indirectly by going over the content pipeline I had to remove most of my collada code and re implement the model loading with the new framework. Loading and displaying 3D models was much simpler this way and especially some early unit tests were really simple, but as soon I tried shaders and loading tangents there were a bunch of problems. I reported many bugs back then and it has gotten a lot better, but I still had to fix several issues in the Racing Game and Rocket Commander XNA myself like finding out the correct shader technique and fixing tangent data with help of a custom model processor.

Some things like the level loading in the Racing Game just do not work with X or FBX files because they use splines, which are not exported at all in these formats. Collada came as the rescue again because it is really no big problem for this format. Later versions of the Racing Game removed the collada level loading and introduced a binary format for the levels, but the importer still accepts collada files.

Recently I wanted to test a couple of animated models and use skinning since it can often be more useful than static animations and it usually looks much better, especially for organic 3D models. As I said above I could not get anything working with the XNA Animation Component Library and I especially do not like the way they still use the content pipeline and the project is too complicated for me anyway (I just do not need 6 different file formats, I just want one and it should work perfectly with all the features I need).

After some searching I saw some guy called remi from the collada forum was working on importing collada models too and I posted some thoughts there too (maybe this was a mistake, I got many emails asking me about tips ^^). Here is the thread about that in the collada forum. He has provided a test project with some models and it works nice for static meshes without shader information, but that was not really what I was searching for.

This was a month ago and I had not much time working on any of these issues, but after restarting my blog earlier this week I thought this would be a nice topic to talk about. I'm still pretty busy with Arena Wars Reloaded, but I worked a couple of hours every day on this little test program for the past few days. The rest of this article explains the project and into which problems I ran.

Class Overview

Before we go into the details here is a little class overview of the project. As I said before the Rocket Commander XNA engine was used to get up and running with the project without having to re implement the basics. Most of the classes were already in place and had not to be changed. ColladaModel and SkinnedTangentVertex are the 2 new classes and to help us out with the XML loading of the collada files the XmlHelper class was also brought into the project.

I wrote the ColladaModel file from scratch, but I could reuse some of the static mesh loading code I had done last year. All of the bone and animation loading code was just try and error and I only used the collada specifications as a source of help, but most stuff had to be tested with the unit tests at the end of the class many many times.

The main program just calls the unit tests TestGoblinColladaModelScene or TestShowBones, there is no real game here, its just a test program. The unit test then calls several Standard Engine classes for doing all the post screen processing, rendering the ground plane, etc. More importantly the ColladaModel class itself basically just provides a constructor and a Render method, everything else is private and will be handled automatically for you. Most people might ignore this, but this is always the most important thing about my classes, the use should be as simple as possible and when I look at the projects mentioned above I really ask myself why people sometimes think so complicated.

The internal Bone class inside ColladaModel is used to store all the bones in a flat list, but each entry has a parent and a list old children bones. This way the list can be used both in a simple for loop, but you can also go through it recursively (which is obviously slower and often more complicated). We will talk about the loading process in a minute.

All the mesh data is stored in vertices, which is just a list of SkinnedTangentVertex structs. The SkinnedTangentVertex struct is very much like the standard TangentVertex struct used in Rocket Commander XNA, but it has 2 new members: blendIndices and blendWeights. Both are in the form of Vector3 and their fore can hold 3 values allowing us to interpolate up to 3 bone influences for each vertex in the shader. More is often not required and we have to re normalize all bone weights anyway, so skipping the least important bone weights is not a big deal. My test models use mostly max. 2-3 influences. Please also note that the vertex shader has now a lot more work to do with all that skinning and you should really optimize it as much as possible. Both the number of vertices we have to process is important (we will talk about optimizing that in the optimizing part of this article) and also the number of instructions the vertex shader has, both numbers should be as low as possible. The GPU is really fast processing this data, but if you do not have animated geometry with bones, there is no reason to let it process all that data (which can make the vertex shader 2-3 times longer and slower). The ground of our test scene does not use a skinning shader as an example.

And finally there are some additions to the ShaderEffect class. First of all we got a new shader called "SkinnedNormalMapping", which does the same thing as the normal mapping (or parallax mapping) shader, but it has an array of 80 bone matrices we can use for skinning. These matrices are set with help of the SetBoneMatrices method in the Set Parameter region of ShaderEffect.cs.

Loading collada files

Before we go into the details of the loading process, lets make sure we read the summary of the class first because it clearly states what we can do and can't do with this class. This is just a test project and I wanted to make things as simple as possible for both you as the reader and for my requirements.

   /// <summary>
   /// Collada model. Supports bones and animation for collada (.dae) exported
   /// 3D Models from 3D Studio Max (8 or 9).
   /// This class is just for testing and it will only display one single mesh
   /// with bone and skinning support, the mesh also can only have one single
   /// material. Bones can be either in matrix mode or stored with transform
   /// and rotation values. SkinnedTangentVertex is used to store the vertices.
   /// </summary>
   class ColladaModel : IDisposable

OK, with that said let's go directly into the loading code, which is located in the constructor of this class. All variables used in these class are just for internal use, all you need to know are the vertices and bone lists, which I have already mentioned, and the vertex and index buffers, which are used for rendering. All the rest of the variables are just there to help us loading the collada file (don't worry, there are not many variables anyway and most methods are short too).

    #region Constructor
    /// <summary>
    /// Create a model from a collada file
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="setName">Set name</param>
    public ColladaModel(string setName)
    {
        // Set name to identify this model and build the filename
        name = setName;
        string filename = Path.Combine(ColladaDirectory,
            StringHelper.ExtractFilename(name, true) + "." +
            ColladaExtension);

        // Load file
        Stream file = File.OpenRead(filename);
        string colladaXml = new StreamReader(file).ReadToEnd();
        XmlNode colladaFile = XmlHelper.LoadXmlFromText(colladaXml);

        // Load material (we only support one)
        LoadMaterial(colladaFile);
        
        // Load bones
        LoadBones(colladaFile);

        // Load mesh (vertices data, combine with bone weights)
        LoadMesh(colladaFile);

        // And finally load bone animation data
        LoadAnimation(colladaFile);

        // Close file, we are done.
        file.Close();
    } // ColladaModel(setFilename)
    #endregion

As you can see first of all the filename is constructed and we just load the file as a text file and throw it to the XmlHelper.LoadXmlFromText helper method (which just uses the existing XmlDocument functionality to load xml from a string). We now get the main collada node, which contains all the children nodes we need for loading the materials, bones, meshes, etc.

Next all the materials are loaded, but we are only going to use the first one we find because we only support one single mesh anyway. The LoadMaterial method goes through all used textures and shader effects from the collada file and constructs the material at the end of the method with help of a new constructor in the Material class itself. While this is cool and a lot easier than loading material data from x files, it is not very exciting code, so let's move along.

Even through the bones are located at the end of the collada file, we have to load them first because all our other loading methods, specifically LoadMesh and LoadAnimation need the bone tree structure and the overall bone list to work. All bones are loaded in sequential order because we want to make sure that we can use the animation matrices later in an easy way without having to check the parent order all the time. Only this way we can be sure that going through our flat bones list we still respect the internal tree structure and always initialize the parents first because the children bones matrices are always multiplied with the parent bones.

    foreach (XmlNode boneNode in boneNodes)
        if (boneNode.Name == "node" &&
            (XmlHelper.GetXmlAttribute(boneNode, "id").Contains("Bone") ||
            XmlHelper.GetXmlAttribute(boneNode, "type").Contains("JOINT")))
        {
            // [...] get matrix
            matrix = LoadColladaMatrix(...);

            // Create this node, use the current number of bones as number.
            Bone newBone = new Bone(matrix, parentBone, bones.Count,
                XmlHelper.GetXmlAttribute(boneNode, "sid"));

            // Add to our global bones list
            bones.Add(newBone);
            // And to our parent, this way we have a tree and a flat list in
            // the bones list :)
            if (parentBone != null)
                parentBone.children.Add(newBone);

            // Create all children (will do nothing if there are no sub bones)
            FillBoneNodes(newBone, boneNode);
        } // foreach if (boneNode.Name)

As you can see the code uses the XmlHelper class extensively because otherwise the code would look much uglier and complex. Next we have to load the mesh itself, this is probably the longest method and not easy to figure out if you work with collada for the first time. Good thing I had already done that in the past and I only had to add the code for getting the blend weights and indices. The following code does load all the weights, which we will use later to fill the blendWeights and blendIndices members of the SkinnedTangentVertex struct vertices list. The code for that is actually a little bit more complicated because we have to find out which weights are the top 3 weights for each vertex in case more than 3 are given.

    #region Load weights
    float[] weights = null;
    foreach (XmlNode sourceNode in skinNode)
    {
        // Get all inv bone skin matrices
        if (sourceNode.Name == "source" &&
            XmlHelper.GetXmlAttribute(sourceNode, "id").Contains("bind_poses"))
        {
            // Get inner float array
            float[] mat = StringHelper.ConvertStringToFloatArray(
                XmlHelper.GetChildNode(sourceNode, "float_array").InnerText);
            for (int boneNum = 0; boneNum < bones.Count; boneNum++)
                if (mat.Length / 16 > boneNum)
                {
                    bones[boneArrayOrder[boneNum]].invBoneSkinMatrix =
                        LoadColladaMatrix(mat, boneNum * 16);
                } // for if
        } // if

        // Get all weights
        if (sourceNode.Name == "source" &&
            XmlHelper.GetXmlAttribute(sourceNode, "id").Contains("skin-weights"))
        {
            // Get inner float array
            weights = StringHelper.ConvertStringToFloatArray(
                XmlHelper.GetChildNode(sourceNode, "float_array").InnerText);
        } // if
    } // foreach

    if (weights == null)
        throw new InvalidOperationException(
            "No weights were found in our skin, unable to continue!");
    #endregion

For more information about the mesh loading please check out the last region in the LoadMesh method, it should explain all the important steps in case you want to add something there or just look how it works.

Problems with the animation data

Getting the animation data was not so easy. First of all I never had done this before because my collada files for the Racing Game were all just static meshes and I really did not need any animation there. Everything that is actually animated in the Racing Game was done directly in XNA, not in 3D Studio.

The first problem is the many formats that animation data can be in. You can have rotations around any axis or translations and even scalings, but most of your bones will only use one or two of these if they are animated at all. Alternatively all the animation data can be computed directly by the exporter plugin in 3D Studio Max and this way you can make sure that all the animation data is in the correct format. It makes testing certainly a lot harder and if you don't even know the format the matrices are in or how to apply them to each other in which order, you are in a world of trouble.

This is exactly what happened to me, I had most of my test models with rotation animation data only, but the Goblin above from my friend Christoph was done with another technique and the exporter could only export the matrices, so I had to support that too. After some try and error I managed to get the basic animations for my test models working. They are all in the project, feel free to load and test them. To test the bone animations I used the following unit test:

    #region Unit Testing
    // Note: Allow calling all this even in release mode (see Program.cs)
    #region TestShowBones
    /// <summary>
    /// TestShowBones
    /// </summary>
    public static void TestShowBones()
    {
        ColladaModel model = null;
        PlaneRenderer groundPlane = null;
        // Bone colors for displaying bone lines.
        Color[] BoneColors = new Color[]
            { Color.Blue, Color.Red, Color.Yellow, Color.White, Color.Teal,
            Color.RosyBrown, Color.Orange, Color.Olive, Color.Maroon, Color.Lime,
            Color.LightBlue, Color.LightGreen, Color.Lavender, Color.Green,
            Color.Firebrick, Color.DarkKhaki, Color.BlueViolet, Color.Beige };

        TestGame.Start("TestLoadColladaModel",
            delegate
            {
                // Load our goblin here, you can also load one of my test models!
                model = new ColladaModel(
                    //"Goblin");
                    //"test_bones_simple_baked");
                    //"test_bones_advanced_baked");
                    "test_man_baked");

                // And load ground plane
                groundPlane = new PlaneRenderer(
                    new Vector3(0, 0, -0.001f),
                    new Plane(new Vector3(0, 0, 1), 0),
                    new Material(
                        "GroundStone", "GroundStoneNormal", "GroundStoneHeight"),
                    50);
            },
            delegate
            {
                // Show ground
                groundPlane.Render(ShaderEffect.parallaxMapping, "DiffuseSpecular20");

                // Show bones without rendering the model itself
                if (model.bones.Count == 0)
                    return;

                // Update bone animation.
                model.UpdateAnimation(Matrix.Identity);

                // Show bones (all endpoints)
                foreach (Bone bone in model.bones)
                {
                    foreach (Bone childBone in bone.children)
                        BaseGame.DrawLine(
                            bone.finalMatrix.Translation,
                            childBone.finalMatrix.Translation,
                            BoneColors[bone.num % BoneColors.Length]);
                } // foreach (bone)
            });
    } // TestShowBones()
    #endregion

The most important call here is the call to UpdateAnimations, which goes through the list of bones and updates the so called finalMatrix from the Bone class for each of the bones. In earlier versions this code was horribly complicated and still had a lot of problems, but as soon as I removed all the rotation, translation, scaling, etc. animation support and just allow loading the correctly baked matrices from the collada files, the code has become much simpler (the actual code does have some optimizations in it, but it is basically the same as the posted code here):

    #region Update animation
    /// <summary>
    /// Update animation.
    /// </summary>
    private void UpdateAnimation(Matrix renderMatrix)
    {
        int aniMatrixNum = (int)(BaseGame.TotalTime * frameRate)) % numOfAnimations;

        foreach (Bone bone in bones)
        {
            // Just assign the final matrix from the animation matrices.
            bone.finalMatrix = bone.animationMatrices[aniMatrixNum];

            // Also use parent matrix if we got one
            // This will always work because all the bones are in order.
            if (bone.parent != null)
                bone.finalMatrix *=
                    bone.parent.finalMatrix;
        } // foreach
    } // UpdateAnimation()
    #endregion

For the loading itself we just have to make sure that the animationMatrices are the correct ones. Collada saves them in a absolute mode. Earlier code from me constructed relative matrices (relative to the initial bone matrix), it was easier to construct relative matrices from the rotation, translation, etc. animation data, but much harder to use these matrices later for the animation. Having these absolute matrices makes the UpdateAnimation code so much easier, so make sure you always use them this way.

However, when rendering the vertices later we can't use the absolute matrices because the vertices have to transformed first to get into a relative space to the bones, rotations should not be around the origin, but around the bone positions. Luckily for us (and you should have seen my face when I finally found out that these matrices already exist in collada and I did not have to create them myself in my own over complicated way ^^) collada stores the so called invBoneSkin matrices for each bone. By applying these matrices we can easily get the bone matrices we need for rendering, these are directly passed to our shader (as compressed 4x3 matrices BTW to save shader constants, the code for that is a little bit more complex, please check out ShaderEffect.cs and the SkinnedNormalMapping.fx shader itself for details).

    #region GetBoneMatrices
    /// <summary>
    /// Get bone matrices for the shader. We have to apply the invBoneSkinMatrix
    /// to each final matrix, which is the recursively created matrix from
    /// all the animation data (see UpdateAnimation).
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns></returns>
    private Matrix[] GetBoneMatrices(Matrix renderMatrix)
    {
        // Update the animation data in case it is not up to date anymore.
        UpdateAnimation(renderMatrix);

        // And get all bone matrices, we support max. 80 (see shader).
        Matrix[] matrices = new Matrix[Math.Min(80, bones.Count)];
        for (int num = 0; num < matrices.Length; num++)
            // The matrices are constructed from the invBoneSkinMatrix and
            // the finalMatrix, which holds the recursively added animation matrices
            // and finally we add the render matrix too here.
            matrices[num] =
                bones[num].invBoneSkinMatrix * bones[num].finalMatrix * renderMatrix;

        return matrices;
    } // GetBoneMatrices()
    #endregion

And this is what you finally get after executing the TestShowBones unit test. I had not implemented mesh loading or the shader itself at this point. I just was loading and testing the bones itself.

 

Optimizing the vertices

One major problem with the loaded mesh is the high vertices count, I had two test models with 30k and 60k vertices and as you can imagine this will slow down the vertex shader quite a lot and it is really not necessary to process all these vertices because many of them are exactly the same. The reason we end up with an unoptimized vertices list anyway is because collada stores seperate lists for each component we have to put together at the end of the LoadMesh method. By doing so we have to duplicate the data many times and we just can't know how often each part is reused and how often the overall vertex changes. If just the texture coordinate or normal differs, we have a completely different vertex, which will produce different results in the vertex shader, so just merging everything together is not that simple.

The rendering uses an index buffer anway, but for the data constructed in LoadMesh it would just be sequential (0, 1, 2 form the first polygon, 3, 4, 5 the next, etc.). Instead of having one index for each vertex, we can often reuse the same vertex 3 or 4 times and reducing the number of vertices drastically. This has also the advantage that we can store much more vertices and complexer meshes even if we still use ushort (16 bit) for our indices (which is half the size of ints and their fore faster). For example if you have 150,000 vertices, but you can reduce them to 40-50,000 optimized vertices, they all can be indexed with ushorts

The easy solution is just to optimize all the vertices after all of them have been loaded, if you have a binary format and do not use collada directly, this solution is absolutely great, but it still will take a lot of time processing the collada models if they just have many vertices because we have to check each vertex against each other one and that can be a lot of compares if you have 60 or 70 thousand vertices in a mesh. It actually takes up to a whole minute just to compute that and I have no slow computer ^^ Here is the method that does all that for us:

    #region OptimizeVertexBufferSlow
    /// <summary>
    /// Optimize vertex buffer. Note: The vertices list array will be changed
    /// and shorted quite a lot here. We are also going to create the indices
    /// for the index buffer here (we don't have them yet, they are just
    /// sequential from the loading process above).
    ///
    /// Note: Slow version because we have to check each vertex against
    /// each other vertex, which makes this method exponentially slower
    /// the more vertices we have. Takes 10 seconds for 30k vertices,
    /// and over 40 seconds for 60k vertices. It is much easier to understand,
    /// but it produces the same output as the fast OptimizeVertexBuffer
    /// method and you should always use that one (it only requires a couple
    /// of miliseconds instead of the many seconds this method will spend).
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>ushort array for the optimized indices</returns>
    private ushort[] OptimizeVertexBufferSlow()
    {
        List<SkinnedTangentVertex> newVertices =
            new List<SkinnedTangentVertex>();
        List<ushort> newIndices = new List<ushort>();

        // Go over all vertices (indices are currently 1:1 with the vertices)
        for (int num = 0; num < vertices.Count; num++)
        {
            // Try to find already existing vertex in newVertices list that
            // matches the vertex of the current index.
            SkinnedTangentVertex currentVertex = vertices[FlipIndexOrder(num)];
            bool reusedExistingVertex = false;
            for (int checkNum = 0; checkNum < newVertices.Count; checkNum++)
            {
                if (SkinnedTangentVertex.NearlyEquals(
                    currentVertex, newVertices[checkNum]))
                {
                    // Reuse the existing vertex, don't add it again, just
                    // add another index for it!
                    newIndices.Add((ushort)checkNum);
                    reusedExistingVertex = true;
                    break;
                } // if (TangentVertex.NearlyEquals)
            } // for (checkNum)

            if (reusedExistingVertex == false)
            {
                // Add the currentVertex and set it as the current index
                newIndices.Add((ushort)newVertices.Count);
                newVertices.Add(currentVertex);
            } // if (reusedExistingVertex)
        } // for (num)

        // Reassign the vertices, we might have deleted some duplicates!
        vertices = newVertices;

        // And return index list for the caller
        return newIndices.ToArray();
    } // OptimizeVertexBufferSlow()
    #endregion

 

Optimizing the Optimization

While this is all nice and dandy and we just optimized the rendering code by 20-30% (I tested with 9 goblins and using 3 passes for them, 2 for shadowing and 1 for the rendering), but the loading now takes painfully long. The main idea here is to not compare every single vertex against every other possible vertex because it does not make much sense, most of the vertices (>99,9%) will always be different. We only need to check the ones that share at least the same position.

I started with comparing neighboring vertices, but since the vertices are stored in index order, they are totally messed up, vertex 1 and 4383 can be equal, but if we just check -10 to +10 we are going to miss it. Instead we have to know which vertices come from the same position data, which we know since collada saves unique positions. All we have to do is to keep a list of all vertices that share the same position and then we can optimize the comparsions later on. Usually only up to 4 to 6 vertices share the same position, this way the whole comparison process just needs 60,000 * 6 comparisons, not 60,000*60,000 anymore.

    // Initialize reuseVertexPositions and reverseReuseVertexPositions
    // to make it easier to use them below
    reuseVertexPositions = new int[trianglecount * 3];
    reverseReuseVertexPositions = new List<int>[positions.Count / 3];
    for (int i = 0; i < reverseReuseVertexPositions.Length; i++)
        reverseReuseVertexPositions[i] = new List<int>();

    // We have to use int indices here because we often have models
    // with more than 64k triangles (even if that gets optimized later).
    for (int i = 0; i < trianglecount * 3; i++)
    {
        // [...] vertex construction

        // Remember pos for optimizing the vertices later more easily.
        reuseVertexPositions[i] = pos / 3;
        reverseReuseVertexPositions[pos / 3].Add(i);
    } // for (ushort)

And then finally the fast vesion of OptimizeVertexBuffer, which uses that data:

    #region OptimizeVertexBuffer
    /// <summary>
    /// Optimize vertex buffer. Note: The vertices list array will be changed
    /// and shorted quite a lot here. We are also going to create the indices
    /// for the index buffer here (we don't have them yet, they are just
    /// sequential from the loading process above).
    ///
    /// Note: This method is highly optimized for speed, it performs
    /// hundred of times faster than OptimizeVertexBufferSlow, see below!
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>ushort array for the optimized indices</returns>
    private ushort[] OptimizeVertexBuffer()
    {
        List<SkinnedTangentVertex> newVertices =
            new List<SkinnedTangentVertex>();
        List<ushort> newIndices = new List<ushort>();

        // Helper to only search already added newVertices and for checking the
        // old position indices by transforming them into newVertices indices.
        List<int> newVerticesPositions = new List<int>();

        // Go over all vertices (indices are currently 1:1 with the vertices)
        for (int num = 0; num < vertices.Count; num++)
        {
            // Get current vertex
            SkinnedTangentVertex currentVertex = vertices[num];
            bool reusedExistingVertex = false;

            // Find out which position index was used, then we can compare
            // all other vertices that share this position. They will not
            // all be equal, but some of them can be merged.
            int sharedPos = reuseVertexPositions[num];
            foreach (int otherVertexIndex in reverseReuseVertexPositions[sharedPos])
            {
                // Only check the indices that have already been added!
                if (otherVertexIndex != num &&
                    // Make sure we already are that far in our new index list
                    otherVertexIndex < newIndices.Count &&
                    // And make sure this index has been added to newVertices yet!
                    newIndices[otherVertexIndex] < newVertices.Count &&
                    // Then finally compare vertices (this call is slow, but thanks to
                    // all the other optimizations we don't have to call it that often)
                    SkinnedTangentVertex.NearlyEquals(
                    currentVertex, newVertices[newIndices[otherVertexIndex]]))
                {
                    // Reuse the existing vertex, don't add it again, just
                    // add another index for it!
                    newIndices.Add((ushort)newIndices[otherVertexIndex]);
                    reusedExistingVertex = true;
                    break;
                } // if (TangentVertex.NearlyEquals)
            } // foreach (otherVertexIndex)

            if (reusedExistingVertex == false)
            {
                // Add the currentVertex and set it as the current index
                newIndices.Add((ushort)newVertices.Count);
                newVertices.Add(currentVertex);
            } // if (reusedExistingVertex)
        } // for (num)

        // Finally flip order of all triangles to allow us rendering
        // with CullCounterClockwiseFace (default for XNA) because all the data
        // is in CullClockwiseFace format right now!
        for (int num = 0; num < newIndices.Count / 3; num++)
        {
            ushort swap = newIndices[num * 3 + 1];
            newIndices[num * 3 + 1] = newIndices[num * 3 + 2];
            newIndices[num * 3 + 2] = swap;
        } // for

        // Reassign the vertices, we might have deleted some duplicates!
        vertices = newVertices;

        // And return index list for the caller
        return newIndices.ToArray();
    } // OptimizeVertexBuffer()
    #endregion

With this optimization loading is now pretty fast and rendering performs also nicely thanks to the quick shaders we will discuss below. When running ANTS Profiler over the new project the slowest line of code becomes the actual text parsing, actually the conversion of the long strings for all vertices data into the actual vertices float data, especially the positions array. But we can't do anything about that without loading the data binary and not parsing them ourselfs. It takes maybe half a second for a 50k vertices model to load, not great, but ok for our little test app.

Adjusting the shaders for skinned meshes

Now we got a bunch of vertices we can render, but as you know we need a shader to do anything in XNA, there is no fixed function pipeline. There are also no animation helper classes like in DirectX, but they won't help you anyway if you want to render with shaders. Transforming the vertices on the CPU may sometimes be a choice if you do not have many vertices and not many skinned models overall or if they all have to be updated the same way. But generally it is a much better idea to transform all the vertices on the GPU, which costs a little bit more instructions in the vertex shader, but the rest of the rendering stays the same. Most graphic apps are pixel shader bound anyway and I use fairly complex pixel shaders too. Additionally on Shader Model 4.0 cards like the GeForce 8800 with up to 128 parallel unified shader units you can do very complex vertex shaders and use simpler pixel shaders and it will just use more units for the vertex shaders automatically :)

We already have defined the bones matrix array for skinning above and we limited it to 80 bones per mesh, which is quite a lot. Even if you would spend 3 bones per finger and 20-30 bones for the body you would still have plenty of bones left for complex animations. Sure modelers will now say "thats not enough sometimes" ... well, you can always split up the mesh into several meshes with up to 80 bones each if you really need more. My graphic artists are happy with 80 bones ^^

If we want full Shader Model 2.0 support we can only be sure that we got at least 256 shader constants. NVidia has usually more (1024), but you still want your game to run on ATI cards too, especially older ones. Each constant can hold a float4 and we need 4 constants for each 4x4 matrix. This means we can only have up to 64 matrices with this limit and we still need some constants for the world, view, and projection matrices, the light and material values and anything else we want to do in our shader. You should reserve 10-20 constants for that and now we are down to less than 60 matrices, which might sometimes be too little.

Instead of splitting the mesh or providing a different code path in case the GPU can do more constants (I couldn't get that do work in XNA for some reason, not sure if there is some limit or if I made a mistake, my GPU should be able to do at least 1024 constants, and even 2048 for the 8800), there is a trick to save only a 3x4 matrix. The last colum is always 0, 0, 0, 1 if we have correctly applied the invBoneMatrix and the animation matrix (see GetBoneMatrices in ColladaModel for details and the order of the matrices). But saving 4 float3 values still needs 4 shader constants per matrix so we have to save it as 4x3 matrices instead.

My first idea was to grab the .w values and reconstruct the translation part of the matrix this way. This worked, but the resulting shader had 80 instructions (from abount 20 without skinning), which is not good for the resulting performance when rendering many skinned 3D models.

float4x4 RebuildSkinMatrix(float index)
{
    return float4x4(
        float4(skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+0].xyz, 0),
        float4(skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+1].xyz, 0),
        float4(skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+2].xyz, 0),
        float4(
            skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+0].w,
            skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+1].w,
            skinnedMatricesVS20[index*3+2].w, 1));
} // RebuildSkinMatrix(.)

A better idea is to use the 4x3 matrix as a 3x4 matrix by just reversing the order we call mul. This involves some changes to the vertex shader code and looks a little bit confusing sometimes, but if you make sure you transform the world matrix the same way and use it in this reversed mul order too, everything works just fine. Another thing that can be optimized is to pre-multiply the indices of blendIndices for each vertex at the loading time. These indices never change and they don't really care if they are 0, 1, 2 or 0, 3, 6, etc. We save one instruction per matrix we are going to reconstruct (the rest is optimized out by the compiler). This is the much easier version of RebuildSkinMatrix, for more details take a look at the SkinnedNormalMapping.fx file:

// Note: This returns a transposed matrix, use it in reversed order.
// First tests used a 3x3 matrix +3 w values for the transpose values, but
// reconstructing this in the shader costs 20+ extra instructions and after
// some testing I found out this is finally the best way to use 4x3 matrices
// for skinning :)
float4x4 RebuildSkinMatrix(float index)
{
    return float4x4(
        skinnedMatricesVS20[index+0],
        skinnedMatricesVS20[index+1],
        skinnedMatricesVS20[index+2],
        float4(0, 0, 0, 1));
} // RebuildSkinMatrix(.)

This results in a vertex shader that has almost half as many instructions as before and their fore is twice as fast :) Good work. Performance tests showed that I could increase the framerate from 220 fps to 270 fps just by doing that (test scene with 9 goblins). The following code is actually more or less the only part you have to replace in an existing shader if you want to make it skinnable (plus providing the helper method and the skinned matrices too of course).

    // First transform position with bones that affect this vertex
    // Use the 3 indices and blend weights we have precalculated.
    float4x4 skinMatrix =
        RebuildSkinMatrix(In.blendIndices.x) * In.blendWeights.x +
        RebuildSkinMatrix(In.blendIndices.y) * In.blendWeights.y +
        RebuildSkinMatrix(In.blendIndices.z) * In.blendWeights.z;
    
    // Calculate local world matrix with help of the skinning matrix
    float4x4 localWorld = mul(world, skinMatrix);
    
    // Now calculate final screen position with world and viewProj matrices.
    float4 worldPos = mul(localWorld, float4(In.pos, 1));
    Out.pos = mul(worldPos, viewProj);

 

Post screen shaders for the final result

All the skinning code and bone transformations are nice once you get them done, but without a cool model and some post screen shaders to make the scene look more cool, it is only half the fun. Good think I got the Goblin 3D Model, thanks to Christoph (WAII) again. I also had a couple of other test models and another more complex 3D Model (big evil monster ^^) which was good for some stress testing, but the material just did not look that cool.

As you can see on the following image 6 render targets are used to accomplish the final image. Most shader passes do several things at once and the list of operations (see right side of the image) is longer than the list of used passes. Most of this was just trying to get the best looking values together quickly. If you are an experienced artist you can probably do much better than me, I'm just playing around with the shader parameters until I get bored and then I leave it the way it is. The sceneMap (render target nummero three) shows the unmodified scene without applying the post screen shaders. It does not look half as cool as the final result.

I hope you enjoyed this article and that you are not as tired as I am writing this all at once (uff). It was a fun project, I have already another one in mind for next week Take care. If you have problems, post a comment. Please note that not all collada models will work, you have to follow the rules of ColladaModel or improve the class a bit for other use

 

References and Links

• SkinningWithColladaModelsInXnaSourceCode.zip (2.6 MB) from this article
• SkinningWithColladaModelsInXnaExecuteable.zip (2.5 MB) from this article
• XNA Animation Component Library
• Panda Exporter for 3dsMax
• kiloWatt X file Exporter for 3dsMax
• Official Collada site from the Khronos Group
• Feeling Software Collada Plugins for 3dsMax and Maya, best exporters ever!
• Public Forum of Collada.org
• Wikipedia on Collada
• Collada Forum post about remi's Collada for XNA project
• COLLADA 1.4.1 Specification (PDF)

 

 

Well, I was posting less and less on this blog and this gonna change now. From now on I will try to post often, maybe even daily. The blog posts will not be as long as before, I will just talk about whats on my mind each day. Initially this blog was started as a little diary for me and I will return to that initial idea.

As you can see I've updated my blog, added a couple of features and changed some pictures and styles. At the top you see a little collage of current game projects I'm working on. Most graphics are from Arena Wars Reloaded and the XNA Racing Game. I hope you like the overall design

I will talk more about my current projects (see right side) in the next couple of posts and catch up with a couple of topics I have on my mind but not blogged about yet (FxCop stuff, CgFX, using Collada in XNA, etc.).

Not much going on here on my blog, but in reality I was quite busy finishing some projects.
Our whole team at exDream is also working hard on our upcoming game Arena Wars Reloaded.
But it will take another month until we can release some cool looking screenshots that will make you excited.

In the meantime you can check out this nice article with lots of interviews on gamecareerguide.com.
On page 3 I do answer some questions and talk about current projects I'm involved in, including the
Professional XNA Game Development book I've done. The book will come out in early may this year.

The article is 5 pages long and a nice read:
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/328/microsoft_xna_.php





While we are at it, I decided to finally post some high quality (1920x1200) Racing Game screenshots (formerly known as XNA Racer).
I don't know yet when it will be released, but it shouldn't take much longer

Screenshot 1:


Screenshot 2:


Screenshot 3:


Screenshot 4:




Lately I'm also playing around with the Visual Studio "Orcas" CTP which was released a week ago. Runs fine side by side with all my other
Visual Studio versions, but some plugins do not work and most language extensions I have installed (like LinQ or ASP.NET Ajax) are just
missing, not sure yet how to fix that or if I will really develop with VS Orcas right now, there is not really an advantage yet.

And finally there is a big fight coming up: Me vs FxCop. I will discuss my experiences with FxCop in a few days after I have converted
Arena Wars Reloaded and fought agains the 7000+ warnings ^^
In smaller projects I had worked with FxCop before and some warnings are annoying, but usually easy to fix. It was a little harder in
the Racing Game XNA starter kit (see screenshots above) because that thing has already over 20,000 lines of code and many warnings were
just about my unit tests, which FxCop can't figure out (lots of uncalled methods). But I will discuss all of this in a few days. Not sure
if any other game development team even uses FxCop or similar tools. At least I have never seen a game (or even a big app) pass the crazy
FxCop rules.

I developed a little Shoot'n'up game in the last couple of days. It is actually quite fun to play. It is just one level and is kind of a prototype. The game will be released together with my XNA Professional Game Development book in a few months (it will be freely available from my website shortly after that). My book features many other games too, it is not just about one game, there are many arcade, action and other games in the book (about 8 games or so) and they will be described as I explain all the important aspects of Game Programming and the XNA Framework.

For now I can only give you a little video about XNA Shooter. I hope you like it.

A "little" 1920x1200 screenshot:

These days there are a lot of discussions about XNA, especially in the GameDev.net boards and of course in the official XNA forum by Microsoft.
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=430119
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=846

I also want to mention a great article by the .NET Compact Framework team about the .NET performance on the Xbox 360 with the XNA Framework. The main issue here is the Garbage Collector, which is not generational and theirfore can only collect all the objects in the GC at once and not in 3 levels like in the normal .NET Framework, which can handle a lot more dead objects and more complicated situations.

Here are the links to the .NET Compact Framework on XNA article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/netcfteam/archive/2006/12/22/
managed-code-performance-on-xbox-360-for-the-xna-framework-1-0.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/netcfteam/archive/2006/12/22/
managed-code-performance-on-xbox-360-for-xna-part-2-gc-and-tools.aspx

From my experience there are a couple of things you have to remember when developing XNA games on the Xbox 360. All of these issue are not a big deal on the PC, but they can cost some extra time until you get them right. One of the main problems is that if you develop your game on the PC only and then test it on the Xbox 360 only at the end a lot of things may go wrong (bad performance on the .NET Compact Framework, UI elements at the border of the screen, which are just not visible on some TVs, bad Xbox 360 controller support, which is the main input device for Xbox 360s, etc.).

• Test test test. This is the most important tip. Write unit tests and constantly test them on your PC AND your Xbox 360. I keep 2 projects open at the same time (both of them use the same files, but I only develop the PC solution and use the Xbox 360 solution for deploying and testing only). Almost all of my classes have unit tests and I constantly test them until they are completed.
• Don't use foreach loops, especially not in tight render loops. This may sound a little crazy since it does not matter on a PC game and todays CPUs are fast enough to handle the creation and deletion of many thousand objects each frame, which most games don't even need. But on the compact framework you will spam the memory even with things like foreach loops because a new enumerator instance is created everytime you start a foreach loop. After a while there will be a lot of dead objects, which have to be collected. This can take some time and slow your game down immensely. The PC version might run at over 200 frames, but your Xbox 360 version is stuck at something like 30-40 frames. Avoiding creation of new data each frame and avoiding foreach loops (just replace them with normal for loops, it is mostly just 1 line of extra code) can improve your performance by a factor of 100% or more.
• In Arena Wars I never created any data during the game. All objects were created at the beginning of each mission and they were reused (which was no big deal since the game principle did not allow an infinite number of units, it always stayed around the same because you get your money back from dead units to build new units). In later project I did not care so much about creating new objects and I coded just the easy way because unit tests drive you into a direction to quickly develop solutions, which work and are tested, but may not be the best in other situations like for the Xbox 360 .NET Compact Framework. That is ok because we can now use the unit tests to check if other solutions work just they way we expect them to work. For XNA Shooter and XNA Racer (and a couple of other new game projects) I now make sure that most of the game data is created at the beginning of each level and not dynamically during the game.
• Save-Regions on TVs can be a pain in the ass. Just google for Xbox 360 screenshots and you will notice that the GUI (graphical user interface) looks a lot different from most PC games. PC games have often UI at the screen border showing you tips, little buttons and other not so important things. If you do that in your Xbox 360 game all of these UI elements may be cut of on a regular TV. For the XNA Shooter I had to rework all the UI elements because they just did not fit on a TV screen and it was not practical to put them in a bar (like the windows task bar) because it looks so different on the PC and certain TV monitors. Instead I put all UI elements in floating bars, which will be adjusted depending on the screen the user is looking at.
  These are some of the Save-Regions I have encountered:
  
  • PC: 100% visible
  • Xbox 360 connected through a VGA cable: 100% (or close to 100%) visible.
  • Xbox 360 connected to an old style monitor with SCART: around 92% visible.
  • Xbox 360 connected through Component cables to my new Dell 24" Monitor (yeah HDTV): around 93-95% visible (depends on the resolution).
  • Some old TV sets (according to the XNA docs and tips on the web) have a save region of 80-90%, but I never saw the 80% case, that is probably the worst case scenario.
  The important thing is to keep the important UI element in this inner 90% (or 93% if you want to be close to the edges) rectangle. This means instead of using a full 1920x1080 pixel resolution you only use 90% of it (1728x945). Or just start rendering UI elements at about 5% of the screen (x coordinate: 96, y coordinate: 54). This pixel locations obviously depend on the screen resolution, just calculate them in your main class and use them whenever you render UI.
• There are probably a lot more tips I can give, but I'm to lazy right now. Maybe more in a little while :)

Btw: I currently also do a lot of OpenGL development again and I have to say I have totally forgotten about the way you can program OpenGL. It is often a lot easier, it only gets hard if something does not work the way you expect it to be (but thats hard in DirectX too). Well, the most annoying part is of course that you have to wrap all OpenGL methods through PInvoke and that just costs time. On the other hand if you already have a robust framework (like I have with Arena Wars, hehe), it is relatively easy to plug in new features. It also took not long to learn the differences between glsl and hlsl. I do currently also test out the FX Composer 2.0 (alpha), which has a great idea behind it, but it is too much like Render Monkey and that is never a good thing. Render Monkey by ATI is just overcomplicated and hard to use (and was not updated for 2 years, which shows that no one even uses it anymore). The great thing about FX Composer 1 was the fact it was so easy to use and it did only support a very limited feature set. It is not the best tool ever, but it was certainly a lot easier to use than FX Composer 2.0, which will hopefully be improved before NVidia release it.
I have confidence that NVidia will deliver a great tool as always, but they have lost a lot of fans in the last months because of the lack of drivers for Vista, especially for the Geforce 8800, which does not work at all in Vista, but it is the only card on the market that even supports Direct3D 10 (and the new cool unified shader technology in DirectX). The only way you can currently use the new graphic card features is to program them yourself natively with OpenGL ... but my 8800 is in repair anyway, else I would have tried out some of the new features by now.

ArenaWars Reloaded - Coming Soon

Hey now!

Before you read on (I guess this is going to be a long post) please also check out www.exDream.com. We made some pictures from our new office and we recently announced ArenaWars Reloaded (see image on the right), a new game with a new graphic engine and many new cool features based on the original Arena Wars idea (the game play and levels will be similar, but look much better).

My little Christmas present for you is the new port of Rocket Commander to the XNA Framework. It allows you to play the popular Rocket Commander (113 000 played games already can't be wrong) on your Xbox 360 for the first time. You just need an Xbox 360 and have XNA on there. Here are the downloads, the file sizes are are little bit bigger than the original game (my comments are below):

• Rocket Commander XNA on Windows (16 MB): Includes Setup, that will automatically install DirectX Dec 2006 and the XNA Framework if you don't have it yet!
• Rocket Commander XNA on the Xbox 360 cannot be redistributed. You currently have to download the source code and run it in XNA Game Studio Express to even get it on your Xbox. Once you have Rocket Commander XNA deployed with help of the XNA Launcher you can start it anytime you want to without having your PC on or having to redeploy it.
• Full Rocket Commander XNA source code (53 MB): All Content, Sound and Music files are included in this download, this is all you need to compile and run the game on Windows and Xbox 360. The music files are almost 50MB (5MB as mp3, which is not supported in XNA).
• Rocket Commander XNA source code only (213 KB). No content files (models, textures, sounds, etc.) in here, just the .cs, .csproj, .sln and .fx files.

Update: 2007-01-03: Fixed some Bugs with the Input, PostScreenGlow and when device loses focus. Works now more stable. Also cleaned up some of the source code.

Note: Use RocketCommanderXna.sln to compile and run the game on Windows and RocketCommanderXnaXbox360.sln to compile and deploy it to your Xbox 360. For additional details please read the XNA documentation.

The game runs at a very good performance on the Xbox 360, you still got over 60 fps in HDTV 1920x1050 (1080p) with full AA enabled.

Check out some of the new screenshots. Warning, all of them are big, HDTV 1080p resolution. Actually I could not capture any images from the Xbox 360 directly, which runs at 60fps on 1920x1050 and uses fullscreen Antialiasing and using the highest settings. These screenshots are from my PC hooked up to my new 1920x1200 monitor, also nice :)

The main menu. Not much happend here.

The ingame HUD and general user experience has changed a bit. There is also a new object for the goal since creating a sphere dynamically is not that easy in XNA.

Rocket Commander is still fast and it pumps up your adrenaline even more in combination with a big monitor :)

Another screenshot from the last level. Please note that you can see more asteroids at the same time than in the original game. You can also look a lot farther and see more items from great distances.

The explosion is unchanged. It still looks the same crappy way, but the AnimationTexture class had to be reimplemented to work with XNA textures now.

Initially I thought "Hey, this is easy, let's port Rocket Commander to XNA.". The initial port attempt was pretty good, it took only 3-4 days to port the 25 000+ lines of code used in Rocket Commander. I could remove some classes and I also simplified some classes, the total number of lines got smaller (~20 000 lines), but after adding some new features and some new unit tests and some testing code for multithreading it is about 22 000 lines of code, still less than the original. XNA is definately the future, MDX was great, but it was not updated for a long time and if you start something new, go with the fresh XNA Framework!

Here are some of my experiences from the process of writing Rocket Commander XNA. Please note that some of these comments were written while I was developing and kinda sleep deprived. Beware of the harsh tone, in the end all worked out great :)
++ means this topic was great and better than MDX.
+ means it was good and nice to work with.
- means I did not like that feature or it was easier in MDX.
-- means this was really annoying and should be improved in the future.

By the way: I did Rocket Commander XNA just for fun, but it also proves how great XNA performs on the Xbox 360. Try to find any other game with this many polygons and effects running in 1080p (1920x1080) with AA enabled on the Xbox 360 ^^ It does not look as good as Gears of War or Halo 3, but it took only 1 man and a short time to develop and it still pushes up to 80-100mio polys each second to the GPU (in some early unit tests, the game runs fine with 20-30 mio polys per second most of the time, check out the model class and its unit tests for more details).

I also use the Rocket Commander XNA engine for 2 other smaller projects because I like the fact that I can test and play these games on the Xbox 360 too and having a complete engine up and running is always a great plus, even if you know how to do a game. It is just easier if you got all the basics covered.

Topic	Rating	Comments
Sound	++	Very easy to use, 1 short class instead of 2 complex ones I had in MDX. Once you get used to XAct you learn that it is a good tool for sound effects, at least if they don't have to be loaded dynamically. The porting process was very simple for sound effect files, they just had to be dragged to XACT and then the project had to be saved, that's it.
Music	--	A lot of converting, different formats, hard to handle, a lot to test, bad documentation. The music from RC was below 5 MB, now it is over 50 MB, which just blows up the source code. Even the compressed take up 13 MB on the PC (ADPCM) and 9 MB on the Xbox 360 (XMA), both in a quality below the original. The rest of the game content (5MB compressed textures, models, effects, sound, etc.) stayed almost the same and could be reused for the most parts.
Unit Testing	-	Harder to use on the Xbox 360, no edit and continue support in the compact .NET framework. There are also no unit testing tools available and all you can do is to call static unit tests from the program class, which is still useful, but harder to do. I still prefer to test on windows. One great thing about the Xbox 360 is the fact that you get multimonitor debugging for free if you have a TV screen and your PC screen. Debug and step through code on your PC and see the result on the TV screen :)
Window handling	++	No extra code required, I could remove several classes and even the helper classes that are still in Rocket Commander Xna are not required for the most parts. Except for some of the game component classes and the design that is not really useful (more about that below) the Game class is really easy to use and simplifies the process to create a new game in a few minutes.
Shaders	++	Everything in XNA is shader based. The original Rocket Commander runs on fixed pipeline only hardware too, but it was a lot of work to handle 2 ways to render everything. With XNA you just have to write the shaders once and just use them. They work perfectly on the PC (Shader Model 1.1 up to 3.0) and on the Xbox 360, all fx files compiled without any problems. Some shaders had to be adjusted to be right-handed now instead of left-handed like in MDX, but that did just take a few minutes to change and all the rest of the shader code could be reused. In the last few months of XNA development I never had once a problem with shaders in XNA, thats really great :)
IDE Features	-	MDX is much older and was never made popular by Microsoft. XNA is new, fresh and great, but it is missing some serious features like Animations for Models. You can implement it yourself, but why even bother with the content pipeline, do it all yourself. It will be much easier and you can extend it in any way you need in the future. XNA development is currently also only avialable with XNA Game Studio Express, which is painful if you are a pure Visual Studio 2005 Professional developer and have lots of plugins you rely on every day (source code management, code rush, testdriven, slickedit, explorer, and many more). This will change in the future and XNA will grow up and dominate the whole world one day :)
Content	--	Sorry, I just don't like the content pipeline (and I have been using it for several months now)! It is bad for dynamically loading textures or shaders or reloadindg them after changes (just not possible with compile-time generated content). On the windows platform you can still load textures and shaders the normal way, which is good, but loading .x file models is just not possible, you have to use the content pipeline. And the content pipeline sucks feature-wise, you have to implement all of stuff yourself. This is my main problem, why should I re-implement generating tangents, shader technique indices, fixing other x file problems, etc. all by myself in a custom content processor, which is not easy to write IMO (bad docu again). By the time I did all that I would have implemented a much more flexible and vesatile custom importer like from .collada files, which are very popular these days ...
Performance	+	The overall performance especially when just doing some benchmarks and performance tests is absolutely perfect on both Windows and the Xbox 360. The GPU is pushed to its limits and there is no reason why you should be afraid of managed code. Windows performance is especially great, all my programs and games are completely GPU bound even in low resolutions and even when they only have one thread. On the Xbox 360 the performance is much worse and you have to take many things into consideration, which is hard because there is again not much documentation around. For example the worst thing you can do on the Xbox 360 is to generate new data each frame, even if you just create an enumerator by executing a foreach loop, it will affect your performance. The good thing is that you have 3 cores (and 6 hardware threads) at your fingertips, which allow you to optimize performance. It was possible for the Rocket Commander game to optimize the game loop a lot because the physics and update threads eat up almost 50% of the CPU time. On the PC it does not matter much because my GPU is slowing everything down (see image below), but on the Xbox 360 I was able to almost double the framerate using multiple threads, nice :) Click Image for to maximize it.
Usability	-	It gets a little easier though all the game helper classes, but the game component class is pretty useless, you can implement something like that in 5 minutes yourself. There is also a DrawableGameComponent class, but you have to call Draw yourself, whats the point here? My classes have some Draw or Render method anyway, I don't need to derive them from GameComponent, I can implement my own interfaces and implement exactly the features I need. Often it is easier to give the Render method a few parameters or even call it several times with different parameters, all that is not possible with DrawableGameComponent. Next there is the content pipeline, which is just a pain in the ass for 3d models. This makes the usability very bad, especially if you develop on Visual Studio 2005 (not Express), which does not support the content pipeline. Also if you are a Vista-Developer XNA Game Studio Express will also not run as expected and my intern hates now both Vista and XNA. It should not happen that someone can get so angry about such great pieces of software, just because they don't work together ^^
Porting	+	If you have written a XNA game or have some XNA code flying around (like the Rocket Commander XNA source code) it is very easy to port existing MDX code to XNA. If you do it from the scratch it is a lot more work and testing until everything works out the way you expect it, but overall it is easy to port from MDX to XNA. Thats very cool, thank the main MDX man Tom Miller for that, who architected parts of XNA too. Porting is easy, but getting the game to work the way you want on the Xbox 360 is not that easy. First of all you got that annoying content pipeline again (I keep repeating myself, maybe I'm too angry ^^), then you have to make sure that you don't render important User Interface on the none-visible area of a monitor that is plugged into a Xbox 360. For example Rocket Commander was only designed for 1 resolution to look good, it had a very small font for some texts on the screen, which is unreadable on TV monitors. Rocket Commander did also not scale well on Widescreen monitors and it rendered a lot of UI elements at the screen borders, which were cut off on TV monitors. The porting took maybe 3-4 days, but I spend at least 4 more days for fixing UI elments and improving the code on the Xbox 360, optimizing asteroid rendering, physics and multithreading. I did not expect that it would take that long and I had only some time in the evenings to even get some XNA work done.
Most annoying		Porting left-handed models, matrices and other complicated math functions over to the right handed system that XNA uses. Maybe it would be easier to use left handed matrices like in the original Rocket Commander for XNA too, but XNA does not provide them and I did think getting it to work with a right handed system would be easier. Then there is of course the problem getting the models into the content pipeline. I used a special content processor, which is also included in the Rocket Commander source code and it can be used for other projects too (I use it for everything I do with XNA). Another annoying thing is the re-deploying of existing game content to the Xbox 360. If you just have 5 files it will not matter to you, but if you got over 50 (Rocket Commander) or even several hundert content files and sometimes due some crazy bug all these files get re-compiled or re-deployed over and over again, it gets really annoying. It takes 30-60 seconds and is not fun ... good think it does not happen that often, but it is still annoying me. Maybe the main reason for regenerating the content on my PC is the fact that I often switch between the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms to test if everything is working the same way on both systems.
Missing features		The XNA version does have all the features from the original Rocket Commander game, including all levels, sub menus and the whole game play. It does not have animated models however because it is not supported out of the box in XNA and I did not have time to reimplement this feature. It does also not support polygon based collision checking for asteroids, which can sometimes be annoying if you fly near asteroids or if you want to fly through the donut asteroid. The problem here is that the mesh intersection methods are missing, all you can do is render models, not much else. Last but not least XNA does not support any network code. On the windows platform it would be possible to still use the Webservice to upload and get highscores, but for compatibility with the Xbox 360 the code is currently commented out. If you want to play with online highscores, just play the original Rocket Commander game. There are also some smaller issues like getting the bitmap data of a texture on the Xbox 360. There is method called GetData in the texture class, but it is not supported on the Xbox 360. There is also no bitmap class in XNA because you would need the System.Windows.Forms namespace, which is not included in the .NET compact framework. I ended up saving the level data into a custom file (.level) and then loading it again with help of standard IO methods (byte by byte, but the loading process is still fast, less than 1 second for all textures, levels, models and sounds). The Rocket Commander Mods are also not supported yet, but porting them should be easy with the existing Rocket Commander XNA source code.
Improvements		The controls, especially for the Xbox 360 Controller have been improved. It is now much easier to fly the rocket, the speed was increased and you can look at up to 4 times as much asteroids thanks to several optimizations and the great performance gain of using multiple threads on the Xbox 360. There are also many smaller improvements to the UI, the structure and some classes in the game, but the game looks still very similar (see screenshots above).

Maybe I will write a little more next week. I should get some sleep now, in a few hours it is christmas time and I have not packed any presents yet.

Now have fun with Rocket Commander XNA and have a nice christmas of course

PS: I know my blog has currently some problems (posting and comments do not work as they should), I will fix that in a week or two, have currently not much time to investigate this issue.

Yesterday was the german developer price 2006 event (Deutscher Entwicklerpreis 2006) in Essen (Germany).

The Lichtburg (light castle) in Essen.

Miriam Pielhau (known from german TV, well at least if you watch german TV, I don't) moderated the event together with the usual hosts (Aruba, politicians, other guys from the german game developer scene).

Martin Kesici (Sat1, Superstars star or something, never saw him before either) did make some music in a short break. Was neither great nor bad.

After about 10 prices were given to the developers almost 2 hours have passed and the rest of the 30 prices had to be given out. In a IMO unprofessional manner everyone just had to come on the stage and get his price. In a matter of minutes the rest of the prices were given out.

Then everyone left to the after-show party with more food, drinks and some games.

And Pong (actually it is called Plong) on the Xbox 360. It really shows how to use the GPU correctly and have all 3 cores at full CPU load. The game looks actually a lot worse, my bad camera just made it more beautiful because I always have a blur, glow and motion blur effect on all my pics :)

Some angle girls dancing around. Reminded me of the song: Rammstein - Engel

And finally a little in-house fireworks show at the end. Always fun to watch.

All in all it was a nice and enjoyful event and it was nice to meet all the usual faces again. If you want more photos check out: www.deutscher-entwicklerpreis.de

Microsoft released their XNA Framework 1.0 and XNA Game Studio Express today, which allow you to build games for Windows and the Xbox 360. To compile and play your XNA games on the Xbox 360 you will need to join the "XNA Creators Club" (for $49 per 4 months or $99 anually). There you will have access to additional starter kits, features, etc.

I ported the Rocket Commander game to XNA, just for fun .. and it runs great. It is optimized to run on all 3 cores of the Xbox 360 and I will finetune it a bit in the next few days to run perfectly on the XNA 1.0 release. The performance is really good, the current build has over 800 fps in PAL on the Xbox 360, in very high resolutions (have only 1600x1200 monitor, but I will test it on 1920x1080 too later this week) it still runs good with more than enough frames.

Here is a little preview picture, it shows about 8 times more asteroids and runs at over 200 fps here. I will try to post some of the porting problems in the next few days, for example all the network and internet code had to be ripped out from the Xbox 360 build and the sound features are a little stripped down in XNA (no 3d listener support, not easy or not even possible to do any stereo or surround sound, looks like playback is all mono :-( ).

Early alpha screenshot of Rocket Commander XNA:

As I reported few days ago a nice guy named Marc Guevremont made a pretty amazing Mod for the Rocket Commander Game called Canyon Commander.

You can download the game (just 2.8 MB) and source code on
www.RocketCommander.com

I also made a little video of the game play, which is similar to Rocket Commander very fast and action packed :)

Text from www.RocketCommander.com:

Canyon Commander

This Mod was created by Marc Guevremont and it really shows how extensible the Rocket Commander engine is.
New features include a completely new Landscape rendering algorithm and a very clever way to build canyon levels.
The mod also contains language files for german, english and french text support for the first time.

The gameplay is basically the same as Rocket Commander, just collect all the items and fly to the end of the levels.
Because the game looks so much different, you will play it very different from Rocket Commander.
Instead of avoiding asteroids you have to fly through canyons and avoid flying into a canyon wall.
This may sound easy, but it is a lot harder than just avoiding some asteroids because you can't see very far.

About the source code for this game: You can probably see quite easily that all the namespaces are still intact
and that most of the engine is unchanged, but if you take a look into the game namespace you will see a lot of new
classes. For the terrain rendering Marc implemented his own classes and he used the basic dependencies from
Rocket Commander to solve all the base rendering, physics and collision testing and finally the game management.

Good job Marc, thanks for the effort. Everyone else: Have fun!

Version 1.0 (16 November 2006) - 2.8 MB (requires Rocket Commander to be installed first) www.RocketCommander.com Server: Canyon Commander V1.0 Installer (2.8 MB) Source code to Canyon Commander V1.0 (259 kB).

Screenshots:


Canyon Commander main menu


Canyon Commander first level


Canyon Commander spiky canyon


Canyon Commander avoid the mines

If you are like me and have missed all the new products released last week, here you go: .NET 3.0, ASP.NET AJAX (formerly "Atlas", which is the new way to code web apps in VS) and all the other new extentions for Visual Studio (WWF - Windows Workflow Foundation, which is just .NET 3.0), here are the links to install. If you are serious about Vista development, you should check it out! Install them in that order:

- .NET 3.0 Framework (seems to be the final version now, 2 MB download, will get 45 MB additional MB in the installer, you need Win XP SP2 or Vista)
- Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 (WWF - Windows Workflow Foundation)
- Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0, November 2006 CTP (WCF and WPF, which means Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation)

And for Ajax use this links in this order

- ASP.NET AJAX Beta2
- AJAX November CTP (more functionality, but still in CTP status)
- AJAX Control Toolkit (very useful controls in here)

Other new stuff:
- Office 2007 Visual Studio Tools on the "Ready for a New Day" site (new site about all the new VS solutions)
- Windows SDK for Windows Vista
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition

Someone recorded XNA Racer, which was shown at some Tokio Gameshow named "kotaku".

Here is the original link. Some harsh tone in those comments, no you don't have to pay 99 dollars to play this game, it will be completly free. And about the "boring" gameplay, hey it was not done, this was just an alpha preview and the game looks much better now and is getting better physics and levels as we speak. Well, at least some are comparing it to AAA titles, thats always nice (and totally crazy, you wouldn't compare a house build by 1 guy to a scyscrapper).

Thanks for posting about it to ZMan and Ultrahead.

I guess I have to release a video of the game myself, these leaked videos look not very pretty and showing off an early alpha version has its disadvantages (almost 90% of the ingame objects are missing, the video shows the second track, which is not done yet, completely dummy and it was an early alpha version, the game runs now about 3 times faster).

As some of you (like ZMan) already found out, there is also an XNA book coming out written by me. I just started a few weeks back writing it (but it will be complete by the end of the year). Funny you can already order it on amazon. I will write more about it when its done. You will not only learn about game programming and XNA, but there will be plenty of practical examples in the book. In every of the 14 chapters a new game is introduced and you go though the process of writing a game from start to finish.

One final note: Canyon Commander is a lot of fun, it is a new mod, which will come out in the next days.


Btw: The Coding4Fun site was redesigned in the last weeks and most of the old links do not work anymore (which is something MSDN usually never does). But now most of the content is back and can be found in the new categories (Rocket Commander is under Games -> Arcade). I also updated the link on www.RocketCommander.com and the link for the video tutorials is:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/gaming/arcade/article.aspx?articleid=997852

Update: The old link works now too, I guess the MSDN relinking system is working as expected now :)

It was nice in Seattle and a great experience meeting the Microsoft XNA Team and people I met like ZMan. But I'm glad I'm back home. There is nothing like the good old home PC, I can type 700 times faster here and it feels much better to do any work here (or at the office here).

Well, the day started yesterday for me, I have not slept yet. Let's get started with some pictures. This is me leaving from the Hotel and waiting for a taxi. It took forever because the traffic was so bad again in Seattle.

Bye bye Seattle and all you friendly people in it.

Checking in at the airport. Had to be there 3 hours earlier than the flight departures. Was only 2 hours before that there (bad traffic and I got up a little late ^^).

But I had to wait 2 hours anyway. The security c