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[The Friendly Monster]

No I meant making the level editor.. I'd to eventually get my Brick Attack clone to use something similar for making levels. I don't know much about XML though.

The XML is not important, I don't know anything about it, just found a faq on serialization and copied a read function and a write function.

The level editor when it is running is just changing different variables that are held in the memory. It took me quite a while to write, as long as the rest of the coding, and I'm glad I've found a way to show it without the pain of trying to explain how to use it!

 

[delirium]

I should get back to trying. I remember I wrote a Tetris clone in C++ back in HS.

Most of my projects die because of the horrid programmer art that accompanies it.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

TFM and everyone else, sorry I haven't been contributing as regularly on the last week or so. Been really busy, and doing some programming whenever I can.

Your level editor is sick. Well done! We're probably just going to do a web-based level editor since we have a couple people that are going to do art assets and level creation. This way it can edit levels and manage them anywhere. We figure we might output an XML file that has

Maps -> Layers -> Elements

...type of deal.

I'd also like to know if anybody has had success getting their XNA projects up on their Xbox and if they've been able to share their games successfully with this new creator's club thingy. Haven't paid their ridiculous membership fee yet, but if it works fairly well then I'm in

My game now has rotation for sprites when jumping/sleding around and such Thanks for the help TFM! The next thing is transparencies, though that seems more confusing to me...

Sorry, missed this post. Thanks for the compliments. I don't know what you mean by a web-based level editor, with mine anyone can change the levels.xml file too. Don't worry about handling the xml too much, just use serialization and it should work fine.

Not used xbox, I don't even have one at the moment, should be getting one quite soon though.

Transparencies are really easy. I'm guessing you use Color.White in your draw method, just change that to

new Color(new Vector4(1, 1, 1, x))

where x is a float between 0 and 1 which determines how transparent your sprite is (also called the alpha channel). 1f is opaque, 0f is transparent.

 

[Label]

I suppose I might as well show what I have been working on. It is still quite early, and there is no slowdown in the game thats just the video cap software

http://www.label0.co.uk/Files/Finalvid.wmv

sorry for no youtube link etc, as I plan on taking this project a little further (my course leader at uni wants to help me polish it up and try to sell it or something needs fuck loads of work done if I ever do that though :lol)

Hopefully with the video you can kind of see what type of game I am trying to go for here (more so the last level)

 

[The Friendly Monster]

I suppose I might as well show what I have been working on. It is still quite early, and there is no slowdown in the game thats just the video cap software

http://www.label0.co.uk/Files/Finalvid.wmv

sorry for no youtube link etc, as I plan on taking this project a little further (my course leader at uni wants to help me polish it up and try to sell it or something needs fuck loads of work done if I ever do that though :lol)

Hopefully with the video you can kind of see what type of game I am trying to go for here (more so the last level)

Looks good, is it XNA? I'm guessing so from the look of that menu, I think I recognise it from a tutorial. Did you make your own physics engine or did you use farseer/something else?

 

[Sectus]

I is making game!

Me and a friend started to remake Prince of Persia 1 (using the graphical assets from the original). The project is still in a very early stage, but I'm quite pleased with the progress considering the project is only about 10 days old.

http://www.tzarsectus.com/prince/builds/2008-05-26.rar - You can try an early build here. All you can do now is some basic movement (along with a very buggy climb up animation). And you can add another player by pressing F7 (controllable with IJKL keys). And you can create a network player by pressing F9 to host a server, and F8 on another instance of the game to join as client (you can do this on the same computer by just starting the game twice, but it also works online if you set up the config.cfg properly with server ip and UDP port).

 

[The Friendly Monster]

I is making game!

Me and a friend started to remake Prince of Persia 1 (using the graphical assets from the original). The project is still in a very early stage, but I'm quite pleased with the progress considering the project is only about 10 days old.

Are you going to try and remake the original exactly, or mix it up somehow?

 

[Sectus]

Are you going to try and remake the original exactly, or mix it up somehow?

Definitely mix it up somehow. We'll be trying to make the basic gameplay as close as possible. But I'm planning to expand on the combat a bit, make new traps (probably just implement some of those from PoP2), make a level editor and add fun multiplayer modes.

I personally think straightforward remakes with nothing new is rather boring. I've seen other projects who's done that and I don't understand why they haven't tried to add anything new to the game while remaking it.

 

[Label]

Looks good, is it XNA? I'm guessing so from the look of that menu, I think I recognise it from a tutorial. Did you make your own physics engine or did you use farseer/something else?

yar tis using XNA, though the menu system the other guy I am working with created from scratch, he just made it look like the tutorial one. We quite like how it looked etc.

We are using Farseer, but we have modified it a bit. There should have been the Farseer splash screen before out logo, odd.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

yar tis using XNA, though the menu system the other guy I am working with created from scratch, he just made it look like the tutorial one. We quite like how it looked etc.

We are using Farseer, but we have modified it a bit. There should have been the Farseer splash screen before out logo, odd.

Cool, although I reckon you should change the aesthetic of the menus, I think they look pretty amateur. I started off using Farseer too, it's pretty cool. I didn't realise that the licensing was so open until I looked again now. Look forward to seeing the progress you make and trying out the game. Keep it up.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

I made a pdf to show the controls of pizzicati

http://gilescoope.googlepages.com/pizzicaticontrols.pdf

I've also made a fairly large document (3500 words + pictures) talking about some aspects of the design, but I'm not sure I'm going to share it here.

 

[trilobyte]

Wow I just found this thread!

I've been just starting to get into game programming myself. Any of you guys looking for help on your projects? I've been playing around w/ 3d programming and directx. I've got a first person game that traps you in a secret room and rick rolls you

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Wow I just found this thread!

I've been just starting to get into game programming myself. Any of you guys looking for help on your projects? I've been playing around w/ 3d programming and directx. I've got a first person game that traps you in a secret room and rick rolls you

Hi, I've been exclusively working in 2d so far but when I start a 3d project I'll likely need some help. Your game doesn't sound too fun!

 

[SaggyMonkey]

Hi, I've been exclusively working in 2d so far but when I start a 3d project I'll likely need some help. Your game doesn't sound too fun!

Just wait, after the Rick Roll level, you move to lemon party island. :lol

 

[trilobyte]

Hi, I've been exclusively working in 2d so far but when I start a 3d project I'll likely need some help. Your game doesn't sound too fun!

Yeah well, it's not really a game but just a tech sandbox for me to learn in

 

[Sectus]

http://vypr.nitrolinken.net/Prince/prince netplay2.JPG - Woot! Did a quick online test and 7 players worked without problems. In theory there's no player limit, only limited by the server's bandwidth. MMOPOP? :B

 

[FightyF]

DreamBuildPlay 2008 Contest has been recently announced!

http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/Default.aspx?JumpTo=HOME

If you register, you get a free XNA Creator's Club TRIAL membership (it says with Trial you'll be able to deploy to your 360 but can't access advanced features).

You can also register a team this time, up to 7 people.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

DreamBuildPlay 2008 Contest has been recently announced!

http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/Default.aspx?JumpTo=HOME

If you register, you get a free XNA Creator's Club TRIAL membership (it says with Trial you'll be able to deploy to your 360 but can't access advanced features).

You can also register a team this time, up to 7 people.

Awesome, I'll give this a try later today, I just got a 360 this week. It should be noted that the competition is 360 only this year.

 

[FightyF]

It should be noted that the competition is 360 only this year.

Yeah, it looks like they want to push that. It looks like later this year, all 360 owners in the US will be able to test out new XNA games.

 

[Chris R]

Can I ask what people use to make their artistic elements? I'm currently using gimp, but it can be a pain sometimes. Also thinking about picking up a Wacom tablet or something since trying to draw shit takes forever with a mouse.

Also thinking about making my own sound effects, but I still haven't found a good guide for integrating sound into a game.

I've been mostly messing around, nothing too fancy or worth showing just yet, but if I can get my CS Professor to allow me to do a full release game for my senior project I'll be spending a shit load more time coding and making art and stuff :lol

 

[Campster]

Can I ask what people use to make their artistic elements? I'm currently using gimp, but it can be a pain sometimes. Also thinking about picking up a Wacom tablet or something since trying to draw shit takes forever with a mouse.

Also thinking about making my own sound effects, but I still haven't found a good guide for integrating sound into a game.

I've been mostly messing around, nothing too fancy or worth showing just yet, but if I can get my CS Professor to allow me to do a full release game for my senior project I'll be spending a shit load more time coding and making art and stuff :lol

Short of procedurally generated content or dropping several hundred dollars on CS3, Gimp is the way to go - warts and all. I have yet to run into an open source graphical editor that is as full featured, even if it suffers that all-too-common-in-open-source assy interface.

Sound, though... there are some awesome programs out there. Audacity is the obvious choice for sampling/modifying any recorded sounds. AdSyn DX is a program I use to create sounds, it's pretty awesome for any sort of bleeps and bloops and techy, synthy sounds. And if you're really into 8-bit sound effects, sfx is pretty amazing.

Also, there's a whole host of tools over at this thread on TIGSource.

 

[trilobyte]

Welp, I dumped the first person shooter idea. Right now I'm learning the ins and outs of 3d programming and collision detection. Probably a week or so away from putting together everything I learned into a game. But getting there. Hopefully I can have a demo of at least one level by sometime in July

So far I managed to figure out a some basic physics for my game:

http://i26.tinypic.com/2a61344.gif

 

[trilobyte]

mmk, mesh animations + directx = teh suck

I went with a .md2 based routine I found in a GameDev tutorial for right now. I'll come back to wrapping my brain around this stuff later. But so far I got a nice 3D walking/jumping robot dude

For anyone needing a 3D modeler that's relatively easy to use and supports exports to popular game formats, I suggest using MilkShape 3D. Outside of paying for (stealing) 3DSMax, this is probably the best one to start off with.

Now time for 3D input. Tomorrow...

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Welp, I dumped the first person shooter idea. Right now I'm learning the ins and outs of 3d programming and collision detection. Probably a week or so away from putting together everything I learned into a game. But getting there. Hopefully I can have a demo of at least one level by sometime in July

So far I managed to figure out a some basic physics for my game:

http://i26.tinypic.com/2a61344.gif

Is there any reason you aren't making a mod to build the fps you want? Do you want to be a professional game programmer?

 

[trilobyte]

Is there any reason you aren't making a mod to build the fps you want? Do you want to be a professional game programmer?

I've always wanted to go into game development however I got lost in the world of java web application development along the way. I always wanted to learn this stuff and I finally have the time to do it.

The first 3d programming I did was build a simple room and a rotating camera, so it was natural for me to start on the FPS shooter path. However I actually don't like FPS games all too much, so I wasn't motivated at all to continue.

But I love run and jump games, so I'm thinking of doing something along those lines. At the very least it'll motivate me to keep working. I'm paying great attention to the physics model and player-to-character interaction since that seems to be a key to having a good platformer.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

I've always wanted to go into game development however I got lost in the world of java web application development along the way. I always wanted to learn this stuff and I finally have the time to do it.

The first 3d programming I did was build a simple room and a rotating camera, so it was natural for me to start on the FPS shooter path. However I actually don't like FPS games all too much, so I wasn't motivated at all to continue.

But I love run and jump games, so I'm thinking of doing something along those lines. At the very least it'll motivate me to keep working. I'm paying great attention to the physics model and player-to-character interaction since that seems to be a key to having a good platformer.

Ok, my concern is that you may be biting off more than you can chew. It's easy to say that you're paying great attention to the physics model, but a big budget game will have experienced professionals solely working on the physics for the entire production time. It's definitely good to have a goal to work towards, but it needs to be realistic.

 

[trilobyte]

Ok, my concern is that you may be biting off more than you can chew. It's easy to say that you're paying great attention to the physics model, but a big budget game will have experienced professionals solely working on the physics for the entire production time. It's definitely good to have a goal to work towards, but it needs to be realistic.

Oh it's definitely not going to be anything complex. The most complicated interaction my game is going to have is sliding. Everything else is going to be simple moving platforms. There were just a few things I needed to accomplish with collisions this early on:

1) Can I jump across platforms
2) Can I detect if I landed on a platform
3) Can I slide off tilting platforms
4) Can I get pushed off a platform

My next steps are the following
1) Can my character movements be translated correctly
2) Does character movement seem natural based on the camera location


Once I get all these steps accomplished, I think I can actually put together a simple level.

I'm trying the best I can to keep things simple, but interesting enough to give me challenges. For example, it was a challenge to create an animated model and translate that model in game code, but I don't plan on doing anything more with my character model other than texturing it Honestly, the physics/trig stuff hasn't been too hard coding wise. It's the art stuff that's kicking my butt

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Oh it's definitely not going to be anything complex. The most complicated interaction my game is going to have is sliding. Everything else is going to be simple moving platforms. There were just a few things I needed to accomplish with collisions this early on:

1) Can I jump across platforms
2) Can I detect if I landed on a platform
3) Can I slide off tilting platforms
4) Can I get pushed off a platform

My next steps are the following
1) Can my character movements be translated correctly
2) Does character movement seem natural based on the camera location


Once I get all these steps accomplished, I think I can actually put together a simple level.

I'm trying the best I can to keep things simple, but interesting enough to give me challenges. For example, it was a challenge to create an animated model and translate that model in game code, but I don't plan on doing anything more with my character model other than texturing it Honestly, the physics/trig stuff hasn't been too hard coding wise. It's the art stuff that's kicking my butt

Sorry, I was under the impression that the animation you made was going to be part of this platforming game, it sounds like you're keeping it simpler than I thought. Have you done those first 4 steps above? Good luck with it.

 

[Chris R]

Well I got the green light to make a game for my senior project, and went and grabbed a 360 controller for ease of development. My only concern now is how will people without a 360 controller play? I can add keyboard controls easy enough, but IMO a controller will be the definite way to play my game...

 

[trilobyte]

Sorry, I was under the impression that the animation you made was going to be part of this platforming game, it sounds like you're keeping it simpler than I thought. Have you done those first 4 steps above? Good luck with it.

Yeah I think I've accomplished the first 4 steps with simulations. Sliding was the toughest: http://i26.tinypic.com/2a61344.gif

I'm now onto game input. I am going to use that robot fyi, however he'll still be bounded by a simple bounding box.

Well I got the green light to make a game for my senior project, and went and grabbed a 360 controller for ease of development. My only concern now is how will people without a 360 controller play? I can add keyboard controls easy enough, but IMO a controller will be the definite way to play my game...

Microsoft provides the XInput API, however I don't think it's compatible with other input devices other than the 360 pad (even a mouse/keyboard). Your best bet is to utilize DirectInput so that other controllers can function correctly. I would first just tackle your project using XInput since it's easy enough, and then worry about making it compatible with other devices. At least that's what I'm doing. The Microsoft DirectX SDK Sample library has some good demonstrations and tutorials on using XInput. I'm knee deep into it right now.

 

[usea]

I realize this is a C# / XNA thread (which are things I've interested in and plan on pursuing eventually), but I'm going to go slightly off-topic a bit. I feel like there isn't enough interest for a new thread.

After almost a decade of procrastination, I've finally jumped into game development. I picked Flash (Actionscript 3), and so far I'm having a blast. I chose AS over C# simply because it's so accessible as a developer and for an audience. If I want my friends to try out something, it's a lot easier to have them click an html url than it is to have them run an executable; I'm sure they would feel some amount of discomfort doing the latter. AS3 is way better than I expected, too. It's easy to use and full-featured.

Anyway, I'm pretty new to game programming. I don't want to do it long term, but I think it's a necessary step on the design path, especially in terms of personal growth. Some stuff seems really easy, but other things I still have no idea how to do effectively.. like animation.

For anybody else who is interested in flash development, this open source IDE called FlashDevelop is really great. Also I don't have to mess with a timeline or any of the silly "content creation tools" that Adobe Flash CS3 has. I can do an entire game with just lines of code and assets.

So far I've been making really simple things just to teach myself certain concepts. I made tic tac toe, and a little particle emitter thing. I've been spending a lot of time on collision detection, which is really complicated for somebody who has never taken anything beyond college algebra. I hope to work toward a simple top-down shooter.

Particle Emitter


edit: btw, I just get an error (send bug report error) when trying to play pizzicati.exe or Plus.exe. I ran the xna requirements checker/installer, and it reported no problems at all. Any suggestions?

 

[Chris R]

Microsoft provides the XInput API, however I don't think it's compatible with other input devices other than the 360 pad (even a mouse/keyboard). Your best bet is to utilize DirectInput so that other controllers can function correctly. I would first just tackle your project using XInput since it's easy enough, and then worry about making it compatible with other devices. At least that's what I'm doing. The Microsoft DirectX SDK Sample library has some good demonstrations and tutorials on using XInput. I'm knee deep into it right now.

All I'm doing is stuff like

GamePadState gp1 = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
if (gp1.Buttons.B == ButtonState.Pressed)
       blah goes here

So I don't know what that exactly would fall under.

 

[trilobyte]

All I'm doing is stuff like

GamePadState gp1 = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
if (gp1.Buttons.B == ButtonState.Pressed)
       blah goes here

So I don't know what that exactly would fall under.

Hrm, XNA? My guess is it's probably a managed wrapper over the XInput API then. Which is perfectly fine if you're building xbox controller games. I would suspect there's a managed DirectInput API somewhere as well, but I haven't done any XNA work so I dunno....

 

[Chris R]

Yea it is XNA. It works fine for me and that is my main focus, but it would be nice if people other than me could play (if they dont have a 360 controller)

 

[Elfforkusu]

I don't have too many questions on the programming side, but does anybody perchance have any advice on distribution of a cell phone (java) game or two? I noticed the dearth of good ones a while back, and decided that since distribution is completely digital to begin with (low barrier to entry) it seemed like something to give a shot.

However, there's still the matter of publicity. I don't know, maybe I should post a demo on GAF and call it a day. :lol

 

[Chris R]

I'd really like to see what the responses are to the cellphone java thing. I'm pretty decent with java and actually already have a few games made in it that would fit on a phone no problem if I could "port" them.

 

[Elfforkusu]

Well, bear in mind that Java Micro Edition is a different beast programming wise than normal Java.

For instance: you're essentially programming for an embedded system, so memory usage is a huge deal, and things like the order you initialize data structures come into play. You have hardly any CPU to work with, so if you're doing any math stuff it better be in precomputed lookup tables. Etc etc

Also: there are no floating point numbers.


The syntax is the same though, obviously, so that's nice.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

All I'm doing is stuff like

GamePadState gp1 = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
if (gp1.Buttons.B == ButtonState.Pressed)
       blah goes here

So I don't know what that exactly would fall under.

The problem with trying to make your game suitable for a lot of gamepads is that you are going to have to write a method to let people customize the controls. Different pads use different indices for different buttons. The GamePad in your code is an XNA specific only for a 360 pad, you'll have to use DirectInput.Device for others.

I'd write your own controller class and then any changes that you make to how input works can be done whenever you like. It's not something I'd worry about too much before actually having a game in place though.

 

[trilobyte]

Whew, it took some hard thinking and a little luck but.... 3rd person free-roaming camera FTW

Luckily my game world geometry isn't going complicated enough that I'll need check for camera collisions.

 

[trilobyte]

Mmk, i have analog movement down w/ a free roaming camera going nicely. It took me a while to get my character to move according to the camera axis (ex: if the character is facing left and the camera is facing so that you see the character's left side, when the player presses up on the analog stick, the character should move up instead of to the left). It turned out I was making it harder than it had to be

The movement is not quite 3d mario-esque, but it's pretty darn close.

I had to bust out my college trig book for it. I'm sure there's a more elegant way, but the way I did it was to divide the left thumb-stick's x axis by its y axis positions and take the inverse-tangent of that to get my turn angle. With a turn angle, it's easy to figure out the character's x and z positions by taking the sine and cos of the angle (using 1.0 as the hypotenuse length). Then just rotate and translate:

D3DXMatrixRotationY(&m1, turn_angle);
D3DXMatrixTranslation(&m2, new_x, new_y, new_z);
worldMatrix = m1 * m2;

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Mmk, i have analog movement down w/ a free roaming camera going nicely. It took me a while to get my character to move according to the camera axis (ex: if the character is facing left and the camera is facing so that you see the character's left side, when the player presses up on the analog stick, the character should move up instead of to the left). It turned out I was making it harder than it had to be

The movement is not quite 3d mario-esque, but it's pretty darn close.

I had to bust out my college trig book for it. I'm sure there's a more elegant way, but the way I did it was to divide the left thumb-stick's x axis by its y axis positions and take the inverse-tangent of that to get my turn angle. With a turn angle, it's easy to figure out the character's x and z positions by taking the sine and cos of the angle (using 1.0 as the hypotenuse length). Then just rotate and translate:

D3DXMatrixRotationY(&m1, turn_angle);
D3DXMatrixTranslation(&m2, new_x, new_y, new_z);
worldMatrix = m1 * m2;

Hey, sorry I haven't been posting on here much recently, been very busy. From your calculations it looks like there is no consideration of how hard the thumbstick is being pressed, is this true? Also I don't think that the way you have things set up is very flexible, there may be some cases where you don't just want such simple commands w.r.t. the camera, e.g. the camera being below the character, after the camera cuts from one place to another, during a custom camera movement. Otherwise congrats on getting things going, are you any further along by now?

Oh also, no chance it's close to 3d Mario controls!

 

[trilobyte]

From your calculations it looks like there is no consideration of how hard the thumbstick is being pressed, is this true?

Not true for character movement. My character tip toes, walks, and runs according to how hard you move the thumbstick. He now jumps with a slight change of height based on the button press (the longer the press, the higher the jump (with a limit of course)). I guess I should have mentioned my speed variable in my post

Oh also, no chance it's close to 3d Mario controls!

lol, I think you took that statement the wrong way. My goal is simply to make controlling in the game as natural as your standard 3d platform game. Which right now is pretty close.

I'll see if I can put together a tech demo or something next week. My real work/job has been keeping me busy so I haven't had time to mess with the game recently.

 

[Alpha_eX]

Anyone here doing NDS development? I'm having some troubles with sprites so have had to draw shapes for my game so far, want to use sprites but not quite sure how to get them working.

If you can help reply in here but drop me a pm so I know to check the thread.

 

[trilobyte]

Hrm, anyone know what's the typical acceleration of gravity for normal platforming games? I can't seem to get my jump rate to feel natural for a platforming game. At earth's gravity (9.81m/s^2), it seems way to fast

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Hrm, anyone know what's the typical acceleration of gravity for normal platforming games? I can't seem to get my jump rate to feel natural for a platforming game. At earth's gravity (9.81m/s^2), it seems way to fast

Well, what is a metre in your game?

I don't think most platformers use a constant acceleration for jumping, in platform games I've played the characters reach a terminal velocity very quickly.

 

[trilobyte]

Just a quick status update

It's been slow going since I've been swamped at work. Hard to code at home when you're pulling long coding sessions during the day already :-/

Anyway, I pretty much have all the constructs I need to start creating my platforming levels. I plan on creating a project website for this game soon. I'll make sure to post it when it's up.

The graphics are pretty primitive, but it's starting to come together. The art is laughable, but I hope to improve the art assets eventually. Right now it's at the very basics so I can work on the level design and gameplay right now.

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Just a quick status update

It's been slow going since I've been swamped at work. Hard to code at home when you're pulling long coding sessions during the day already :-/

Anyway, I pretty much have all the constructs I need to start creating my platforming levels. I plan on creating a project website for this game soon. I'll make sure to post it when it's up.

The graphics are pretty primitive, but it's starting to come together. The art is laughable, but I hope to improve the art assets eventually. Right now it's at the very basics so I can work on the level design and gameplay right now.

Sounds cool, I look forward to seeing it.

I'm going to start working on stuff again this week, maybe even some 3d! Still in the middle of job applications.

 

[Feep]

Hey, everyone! I started a bit of XNA programming a week or two ago due to a game idea that I just think is fan-bloody-tastic. I should have a working prototype in another week or two. A few questions:

1) Using the XACT/Cue audio system within XNA, is there a way to pause a running sample and then begin it again at the exact same point at which it left off?

2) To distribute this game to someone who does not currently have XNA and/or Visual Studio 2005 C# installed, what would I need to include/have them do for them to be able to run my executable?

 

[The Friendly Monster]

Hey, everyone! I started a bit of XNA programming a week or two ago due to a game idea that I just think is fan-bloody-tastic. I should have a working prototype in another week or two. A few questions:

1) Using the XACT/Cue audio system within XNA, is there a way to pause a running sample and then begin it again at the exact same point at which it left off?

2) To distribute this game to someone who does not currently have XNA and/or Visual Studio 2005 C# installed, what would I need to include/have them do for them to be able to run my executable?

Hey Feep,

Sounds cool, look forward to seeing it.

1. Yeah, use Cue.Pause() and Cue.Resume()

2. you need the XNA redistributable (2mb)
up to date directx
the .NET framework2.0 redistributable
the Visual C++ 2005 SP1 redistributable package

also they need a graphics card with support for pixel shader 1.1 (anything fairly recent)

It's a pain in the arse, I wish microsoft would come up with a better solution.

Some guy wrote a useful program to check the stuff you need here http://xnamatrix.com/

Good luck

 

[alexh]

How clunky are the XNA types? Would this be pretty easy to pick up if I know a lot of java/C pound?