Nick Gravelyn

One thing that is quite common in games is to utilize multiple buttons for the same action. Most usually you’ll see something like this:
GamePadState gps = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
if (gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.Start) ||
gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.Back) ||
gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.A) ||
gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.B) ||
gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.X) ||
gps.IsButtonDown(Buttons.Y))
{
// do stuff
}
That’s quite a pain just to see if one of those buttons are pressed. There must [...]

As mentioned in the comments for my last post on exception handling on Xbox, you can run into some issues with that code with the GamerServicesComponent. If your first game initialized it, you can’t initialize a second one. So how can we solve this issue without having to get rid of the nice message box [...]

What do your physics system and rendering system have in common? At first consideration you might think not much, but you quickly remember that the physics system sets up the position and orientation of every object and your rendering system needs that information to draw things. So how do we utilize a physics system with [...]

This is a quick post since there’s not a terribly large amount to it. I wanted to play around with split screen rendering with SunBurn and found that, as expected, it’s pretty easy to set up.

At this point in the series, we have a tank and a piece of ground being drawn with some shadows. That’s fine if you’re making a 3D model viewer, but games usually have things that move around and animate. This time, let’s go ahead and animate the tank.

In my last SunBurn post we set up a skeleton game for working with SunBurn. Unfortunately that left us with an ugly grey box, which is incredibly sad given what SunBurn can do. This time we’re going to actually get some things on the screen and start seeing just why SunBurn is such a useful [...]

Today I really dug in with Synapse Gaming’s SunBurn lighting/rendering engine for XNA Game Studio and I’m really happy with this product. At first I was afraid that this was one of those packages that required a lot of special code and would wind up with your game engine being highly dependent on and structured [...]

Today I really dug in with Synapse Gaming’s SunBurn lighting/rendering engine for XNA Game Studio and I’m really happy with this product. At first I was afraid that this was one of those packages that required a lot of special code and would wind up with your game engine being highly dependent on and structured [...]

It’s quite common for a game to desire a fixed aspect ratio. Most games on the Xbox 360 are fixed at a 16:9 aspect ratio because they assume you’re on a 720p or 1080p widescreen television. If you are on a television that isn’t 16:9, the Xbox 360 will automatically letterbox your game for you. [...]

I started working on a quick game for the latest XNA 7 Day challenge and wanted to simplify my input a bit. I knew I wanted to centralize it all to make things easier, but I also wanted to make the code simpler when I needed to check input. I’m only doing keyboard input, so [...]

This has been quite a week for game developers, specifically those of the financial constrained type. Two very nice tools have now released in free forms for indie developers:
Unity 3D
http://unity3d.com/
Unity is a great tool. You script in Boo, Javascript, or C# and most of what you do is drag and drop in their full 3D [...]