Third XNA Game : WiiSnowball

Thu, 01 May 2008 17:55:42 GMT

WiiSnowball

[Requires XNA 2.0]

Game Type : "Family Friendly" First Person Shooter

Project Status: Incomplete / To be completed later

Team: Myself (coding / 2d artwork) & My brother (3d modelling)

WiiSnowball was a project my brother and I came up with over spring break. Originally, for my WiiMotion major design project, we wanted to have a few different games to showcase the potential of the platform. So most of my time over spring break I spent coding this game - and my brother did artwork (the player models, the nice looking level).

Technically, the development time was about 2 weeks - but this leveraged the engine I had already started using. I thought it was going to be a fairly easy project, but it turned out to have some nuances that made it more challenging. It turned out to be fairly fun, however, there wasn't a lot of dynamic to really keep it interesting. Running around and throwing snowballs at other players or bots got old after a while, and my brother and I didn't really have any ideas on how to increase the fun factor. We did try adding a snowmobile vehicle, but it didn't work so great and didn't add much.

In addition, I could leverage the Wiimote library as well, although you can play with the keyboard and mouse too. The game is meant to be played with a Wiimote, and headtracking, although the headtracking was never implemented fully for this game.

The biggest challenges for me were:

fixing some bugs in the engine - this project was valuable in tracking down bugs but there were also some frustrations. In the end, it was totally worth it, because these bugs would've caused problems for shattered metal as well!
Designing a flexible user interface that was menu-driven. We were kind of going for an old school look and feel, and the menus had to be dynamic (ie, for teamplay/deathmatch, you had to have different options). It took me a little while to settle on a design I was happy with.
Implementing split screen - this was the first game I have made multiplayer on the same machine. There were some issues with this that were interesting to figure out.

All in all it was a pretty fun project. Maybe there will be a Snowball Game 2.0 coming out in the near future, utilizing my new engine in development!

A download is not available because it is unfinished, however, here are some screenshots:

XNA Content Pipeline Issues

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:59:46 GMT

In the past week I've been trying to get familiar with XNA's content pipeline. I've found it really confusing to try and get a grasp on what is going on with it.

At first, I had difficult understanding the process. But it seems to make sense:

First, you import the object and output it as a common Document Object Model.
Then, you process that output into a format that gets written to a .xnb

Finally, you write a reader to read back the data from the xnb

This makes sense, and having a common Object Model for importing could definitely save time. I'm writing a BSP importer, and currently targetting Quake 3 BSPs, but if I make a standard DOM, then I should be able to easily add support for other types of BSPs as well, as long as they fit the requirements of my DOM.

The problem I have with the content pipeline so far is that I don't understand exactly how to create a vertexbuffercontent. My Q3BSP loader worked great when I could just make an array of my custom vertex format (with the position, normal, binormal, texture coord, and lightmap coord) and use SetData<> to load the data into the buffer. It was pretty easy. But now I have to deal with all this other stuff, a NodeContent object and a GeometryContent object and specifying all the vertex channels.... It seems kind of silly to me that it has to be so much more convoluted. Why can't I have more control over how the vertex buffer gets created?

I'm almost tempted to just write out the data as an array to the xnb, and read it back in, and then populate the vertex buffer using SetData again... But i'm going to give this stuff a chance, I'm sure I just am ignorant about how powerful it is and how much easier it could make my life.. I'm always frustrated at first when I don't understand something

Bryan's space: XNA

Third XNA Game : WiiSnowball

XNA Content Pipeline Issues