Hello.

Just a quick update to say that I am about to start converting the current Parallax Engine to GSE Beta, I belive I need to do this because of the significant changes that have taken place since beta 1. Most of all the Game Designers have been removed. I really like the idea of having Game Designers so that you can quickly configure the basic components that you are using on your game, however to get 360 support they have had to be dropped.

For the life of me (Not literally!) No matter how many times I update my ping on Technorati it never updates the its representation of my blog! Grrr. No matter how many times I email support, I still get no response! Good work Technorati! tags: technorati, problems

I had a major problem with type converters the other week (see Problem with List <T> and TypeConverter), I could never get them to work as I wanted. I had a Generic list that held a list of objects of type T, simple enough. However when I came to try and use the typeconverter in a component on an XNA Game form or a Windows form they would not work, as expected, additionally the Visual Studio Designer would not create the code for the properties that.

Following on from on of my previous blog entries [http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2006/07/project-that-i-thought-was-good-idea.html] Iforgive.eu - The Flower shop for all your forgivness needs Iforgive.eu - The forgivness website where you put your sins for all to see on the site and then you will be peer assesed as to whether you derve forgiveness Iforgive.eu - The forgivness website where you send an open email to the person you wronged and then the public will see if they forgive you or not.

I was looking at the F14 XNA game that ARogan produced [http://aroganworld.blogspot.com/2006/09/f14-xna-game.html]. Some of the features are: - 1 level of play including 3 enemy types and a boss - 3 levels of parallax scrolling - sound - high score - animated sprites, rotation, scaling - basic enemy ai, track the player, movement patterns - robust scripting engine so making your own levels would be easy. - “realistic” graphics (ha!)

I have been reading "Long Tail[[posterous-content:kjDoEfhcchhpnHHyeDkA]]" by Chris Anderson. A lot of blogs I have been reading recently all talk about the long tail as in the phenomenon and not the book, but when you trace the history of the phenomenon it all points back to this book (or blog) I thought the book was good, I read it quickly. I found myself saying "well that is obvious" on every other page when Chris was talking about limited choice against infinite choice, aggregators and filters etc, but that is not a bad thing, it points out the obvious to make you realise you can that the answers are right in front of you.

I have just installed Windows Live OneCare Beta 1.5.1785.18. I was in the past using Windows Defender. I have only really tried the TuneUp and the Protection Plus. My problem with the OneCare Tuneup is that it doesn’t really do much and what it does do it doesn’t tell you what it is doing, for instance when defragging all it said was “C:\” only at the end of the process did I find that it did not do it because it didn’t have enough space.

I ran into problems with the XNA Beta1, where by I had a class that had a Vector2 struct in. The problem with the XNA Vector2 struct is that there is no TypeConverter for it at the moment. This means that there is no support in the designer. I initially solved this problem by assigning a type converter to the public property on my class that used the Vector2. (see below)

I have created a video to show you how easy it is to create great scrolling layers for your game in less than 3 minutes (including me making mistakes). The basic components of the parallax engine are four fold: the engine itself the layers the camera the scrollers. The enigne co-ordinates the layers by using the camera and the scrollers. The layers represent a repeating background.

I have just made the first Alpha Release of the XNA Parallax Engine. It can be found here. It needs a lot of work to make it more proffesional. It needs examples, documentation, artwork and much more. If anyone is interested in helping drop me a line [paul.kinlan@gmail.com]. tags: XNA, help, request, parallax

I have updated the code again, it now includes the first of many demos. The first demo is simply a single scrolling background. It is not complex, but it requires not code (other than initialization). I am working on making it the Initialization for the layer collection work correctly. Have a play if you want, the source can be found at [Codeplex.com] tags: xna, parallax, engine, c#, .net, 2d, scrolling

I have created a project on Codeplex, and I must say that I am really impressed. If this is Team Foundation Server, then it appears to be mega easy to use. Much easier than Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest. It just fits in so nicely with VS2005. I am still experimenting at the moment, and I am having some issues with the fact the VS C# Express, which you have to use for XNA doesn't support Team Foundation integration.

I am having a bit of difficulty with TypeConverters and Generic Lists and I was hoping that I could get a bit of advice. I have a type converter that is used to create the constructor code for my component. (It is an XNA a Game Component, but I don't think that that has anything to do with the problem because it appears on a Winform) inside another component. For instance I have the following:   Code highlighting produced by Actipro CodeHighlighter (freeware)

Yay. Xbox360homebrew has blogged about my Paralax Engine Project. Thanks. Just need to get some more code up and more people involved! :) tags: xna, gamecomponent, codeplex

I have started a Paralax (I think I got the spelling wrong :) Scrolling Component over on CodePlex [http://www.codeplex.com/]. It is an open source type of project that is designed to help game writers create repeating scrolling backgrounds. It is far from complete but has some basic functionality, such as a 2d Camera, Layer Oscilators and also Scrolling and Clipping. If you are interested in either the code or helping me code it visi the XNAParalax Component http://www.

I was messing around with the XNA development environment the other day and I started to make a componenet that I thought would be pretty cool to use. I got to the point where my Component had a Vector2 public property that I could use in other components but also change it in the Game Designer.The only problem was that Vector2 is a struct and doesn’t have any way to change the values of the Vector 2 in the designer.

Because I am a nerd and I want to develop some games using the XNA for the PC and the 360 when it comes out, I went down to the local GameStation and bought a cheap second hand Xbox 360 controller. I have just been testing the programming model with it and all seems well. I can sesne the pressure on the triggers and all that stuff using the XNA.

I have started processing hCard stats on www.topicala.com (stats can be found at www.topicala.com/ping/hCardStats) with thanks to www.pingerati.net. hCards are a microformat that describe your contact information in a manner that can be parsed by machines, but is also human readable and therefore can be included inline with any html that you make. Pingerati is run by Technorati and is a service that notifies other services (such as mine) of updates to peoples sites and blogs.

A short while ago I wanted to convert my ajax tagger in to a Windows Live Writer Plugin. After some silly mistakes creating sample plugins I started to learn how the API works and some the short falls of the current API. The main thing I noticed was that you cannot access the text of the post inside your plugin. You cannot access the selected text either. I pinged off an email to the Window Live Writer Forum

I think I am probably in a minority with the XNA, I am running on a really old athlon with a Geforce 2MX and I had to change some code because of a Device Creation Exception. If you get some errors, check the inner exceptions and see if it is your device, i.e. Graphics Card that is causing the problems. In my case my device doesn't support MultiSampling on the Backbuffer so I had to add the following line to the InitilizeComponent in the Game object.