XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio!

XNA Framework

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    - Game Distribution Click on the Project | Properties menu - go to the Signing tab on the dialog and make sure none of the boxes are checked. If they are, uncheck them, rebuild and send him the new exe. If they're not checked, someone smarter than I will have to help. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Humorous but somewhat serious question about XNA "People will make a clear decision as to whether they want that sort of product -- a kids toy -- or they want high-definition gaming and entertainment and all that it brings." Source: http://www.gamespot.com/pages/unions/read_article.php topic_id=25129507&union_id=5331 But yeah, I'm not really arguing here. I just don't see XNA's performance overtopping the Wii's graphics ability which is far below competative standards for today's games. Native DirectX has built Oblivion alone, which is more awe-inspiring. I still like XNA - it's a great tool for hobbyists, and they will probably never meet the day of XNA's limits so it's perfect for them, but it will still have to win me over for commercial development. And yes, far beyond XNA Racer. Good start though :) I'm willing to be swayed over to XNA though, but it may take a few more versions to get to that point. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Help with moving towards a given point sorry that will be the time since the last frame, you can use gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds for that. dont forget to add a little speed to the normalized direction vector or it will probably crawl along really slowly :) Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - How do I turn on antialiasing? I see this same behavior. Setting to 2x with a custom profile gives me what I want, but application controlled leads to no anti-aliasing. I have a Radeon x600 series card. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Managed DirectX Sprites: Is it possible to light them? I haven’t tried but I guess that won’t work. Take a look at the sprite helper function. I’ll do that tomorrow but I guess it’s using an unlit vertex format. You can use the System.Drawing.Color passed as an argument to the Sprite.Draw2D function to simulate lighting, but that would require to calculate the light color at the point. You can also do something similar using Point Sprites, some kind of 3d positioned sprites, but they have some constraints. You cand also do a billboarding manager class, as I do. There was an example of how to do that in a DX SDK sample some versions ago. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - How to use View and Projection matrix? Man, I haven't read anything about Culling yet. Is it really necessary I've trayied but didn't work. Tks Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - My shadow maps work on Windows, not Xbox 360 Yeah the demo is only for a single light, and only for a directional light. My full game supports more features than that, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, though in doing that perhaps it doesn't address the problem you are having. I think a lot of the issues other people are having with shadow maps have to do with trying to use the same depthstencilbuffer information for the frame buffer and their shadow map render target, which my demo addresses. It is true that the 360 doesn't support multiple _active_ render targets, but I don't think that should be an issue in your case unless you are trying to process multiple light render targets at once through your shaders. I got the impression that you're looping the lights one at a time from the C# code, which should work fine. Using the frame buffer for composition on the 360 shouldn't be a problem, though I guess it is possible that the default blend modes for shaders might be different on the PC vs the 360, which could be a problem if you're relying on any of the default modes, but that is pure speculation and I don't know if its true that the modes are different.. someone on the XNA team should know for sure, though. In any case it should be really simple to modify the code to composite to a render target rather than the frame buffer and just present that as a screen aligned quad at the end. It is probably worth doing that anyway to compare the performance of that vs the frame buffer on the 360 side. If you post a small sample that exhibits the broken 360 behavior, I'll take a look and see if I find anything obviously amiss. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Problems implementing a skybox Here is a small article/tutorial on a sjybox in XNA that should get you started. http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php article_id=71 Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - XNA on Original Xbox? I don't think the original Xbox will be able to run the .NET 2.0 framework, and that's what XNA is based on. Also, like Jim said, I doubt they'd put significant effort into supporting a system they want to move away from in the future. Edit: Obnoxious Font Size Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Templates I need help running it in the command prompt... I don't know how to navigate to the directory and then run the setup file... :( Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Creating Plane From A Model? I was thinking more along the lines of plane - sphere intersection ( i actually dont know what culling is...) Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - VertexBuffer.SetData cost Fascinating, I didn't know about DrawUserPrimitives. I'm focusing on Windows at the moment, but now I'm curious...is there a performance difference on the Xbox for VertexBuffers that are rarely changed I'm working on porting my 2D graphics library from MDX (flecko.net/trans2d if anyone is interested), and by default everything is drawn using VertexBuffers that usually don't change, but there's also the option to use vertex caching and write a bunch of stuff that all uses the same render state, technique, etc. to a VB and draw it all at once. So from the sound of things, if I want to do this caching on the Xbox, I should collect vertices in an array and then call DrawUserPrimitives once it's full. But for the (hopefully uncommon) case where caching isn't possible, what's the best route to use Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - A.I in games Pathfinding is done with recursive function Basicly you call a function that try to go to 4 direction from one point You go to that new direction and call the same function again Your function will stop when the position is not reachable And the recursive function will search all possible path until it find the pacman This will very fastly evaluate many possible path Your Ghost may be program to be going to the path that would lead to your Pacman faster or slower By randomly choosing the longuer path or the shorter path Or even run away from it when your pacman ate the pills Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - TestCooperativeLevel in D3D10 DXGI_STATUS_OCCLUDED and the results of GetDeviceRemovedReason are two different things. DXGI_STATUS_OCCLUDED tells you only that whatever you draw would not be visible because your window is hidden. The device is still ready and you can ignore DXGI_STATUS_OCCLUDED. It’s only a hint to save CPU and GPU work. The error messages from GetDeviceRemovedReason are more critical as a D3D9 device lost. After such an event the device is in a highly undefined state. The only thing you could do is to shut everything down and create a new device and all resources. But such events require a massive problem in your system. It would only happen after a hardware or driver failure. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Undefined errorcode from D3DXGetImageInfoFromFile Got the errorcode: 0x88760b59 (hex, 32 bit) Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Still... I dont know if you can compile DX10 applications on Windows XP, but i know that DX10 doesn't run on Windows XP only Vista... Just use DX9 unless theres some major reason to use 10 Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - A tool to help with Sprite Animations: Sprite Strip Composer Fantastic tool, will greatly ease any production of animations I do for games (one of my least favorite jobs) Saves having to make the images and render them in game to see what works, Great job. Suppose it would also be nice to batch several animations for differen elements into th same file as well, create a batch of animations. Saves on texture memory usage in game. Lovely Darkside Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Fog? hmm never mind found the answer: Fog does not work in Shader Model 3, to get fog to work either use SM2 or calculate fog in the pixel shader yourself. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - loading large image using DirectX Actually, using Direct3D is not the best choice for your want, even more so if you want to edit the image. As a side note, it is possible to use the GPU for image editing and get better performance than using the CPU, but that's really an advanced topic. First of all, using D3D will make the memory problem worse, much worse in fact, for at least 2 reasons: the D3D system will eat some memory itself; the image data that gets rendered to the screen is not directly accessible by the CPU (there are exceptions, but again this is not simple stuff), so you end up with at least 2 copies of the image. Also, the performance would not be great either, because of the additional overhead of passing the data back and forth between the CPU and the GPU - readbacks from the GPU are particularly slow. And if that's not enogh, please take my word on it that learning D3D programming to the level where you can write even a decent (not production-ready) image editor or advanced presentation layer using it is not going to be a one-week business. On a more optimistic note, a better way to do this would be to stick to the Windows GDI+ API - at least that's how I would do it. Obviously, having a huge image in one piece and moving it around will be really slow, so you need to cut it in smaller pieces and display those of them that actually are visible. For really big images, you might even want to implement a streaming mechanism so that you don't stall the application while reading 10+ MB of data from the disk. Oh, and yeah, this is another reason you might want to stay away from D3D for this app: for virtually all the cards around, the texture size limit is 4096x4096, or even 2048x2048 for older ones. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - 360 Dev do's and don'ts This one bit me. If you're doing audio programming, make sure you call the dispose method on any Cue that you retrieve with GetCue() after it's done playing. If you don't need to stop or pause the cue, you can simply use the PlayCue() method. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Mesh Display Not Symmetrical When you calculate the aspect cast the values to float, like: float AspctRatio = (float)DescripBckBuf.Width / (float)DescripBckBuf.Height The width and the height values of D3DSURFACE_DESC are basically integers and when you divide these as non-floats you basically get back an integer. So instead of 3/2 = 1.5 you actually get 3/2 = 1. If Roberts code is right and you’re having to scale then it seems that this might be your problem, especially if it does the same thing with other shapes. When dealing with the world transform, scale first, then rotate XYZ, then translate. When dealing with the view transform, translate first, then rotate ZYX, forget scaling. Also set the perspective once, just after you’ve created the device, you don’t have keep setting it all the time, it’s just a field of view. If you’re resizing the window it’s actually best to reset the device so you get a new back-buffer that matches its dimensions, this usually means recreating the rendering stuff, which is why most games won’t allow you to resize the window. // Something simple, like IDirect3D9* D3D; D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS Params; RECT ClientRect; D3DDISPLAYMODE DisplayMode; D3D->GetAdapterDisplayMode(D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT, &DisplayMode); If(Windowed) { GetClientRect(hWnd, &ClientRect); Params.BackBufferWidth = ClientRect.right; Params.BackBufferHeight = ClientRect.bottom; } else // Fullscreen { Params.BackBufferWidth = DisplayMode.Width; Params.BackBufferHeight = DisplayMode.Height; } // Create device // Set perspective float AspectRatio = (float)Params.BackBufferWidth / (float)Params.BackBufferHeight // … Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Setting project up to be cross platform Here's another aspect to this question (if too far off topic, I'll start a new thread) For the Xbox360 XNA is using the Compact Framework. Does that make it easy to convert a game for a mobile platform And if so, that would be another Project type to consider. Back to the Win/Xbox, can an XNA Class Libraries be used in a Windows XNA Project and a Xbox XNA Project Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Animated Sprite - the MSDN example Thanks both. It was probably just the end of a long day, but I was still a bit confused at how rectangle works - you can probably help me there too ;) - is the placement and size of the rectangle different to the content pasted 'into' the rectangle or can you do both in a single command e.g. set up my drawing area to start at 0,0 and set its size to 16,16 - then using my image take a snap from say 16,0 to 32,16, and paste that at 0,0. Hope that makes sense, at least my head it appears to - hmm! Cheers :) Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Responding To Graphics Device Events Thanks for the links. I do understand both of those pages. This isn't directly related to my problem in the other thread; I simply wondered if this part was correct or not and figured it may trigger problems elsewhere if it was incorrect. My post here is mainly because I'm not using the XNA defined GameComponent class because 1) I wanted experience in designing the class and I have a liking for being able to see everything that's going on and 2) I wanted to extend the functionalities in a way that would be easier if I were to replicate the class rather than extend XNA's. I simply want to know if my assumptions of where the true's and false's come from (as far as the event handlers) is correct. I believe I have them correct, but if anyone knows for sure, I'd appreciate it. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Microsoft C# Not C# express VS Pro also supports plug-ins and add-ons (none are supported in the Express edition). Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Install XNA games on another computer? Glenn Wilson wrote: In regards to publishing you will have to wait till the April release as those functions are said to be included, but at the moment the remote computer must have GSE and the XNA system installed. To clarify, the April release will include "developer sharing". It allows developers to package up binary copies of their games to share with other developers. Developers are still expected to have XNA GSE installed to use it both to package and unpackage the games. It is not another installer technology for end-users (people who want to play your games). For that, developers are still expected to use MSI or ClickOnce, or other technologies. For most people, the primary benefit of the developer sharing feature is a way to share your Xbox 360 games without distributing the source code or requiring other people to build the project themselves. Those people will, however, still be required to be members of the XNA Creators Club to deploy and launch the game on their Xbox 360. Baby steps... But steps nonetheless. --Stephen Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Japanese Document for DirectX in future? It seems that after DX9, there's no offcial Japanese Document released by Microsoft Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - C# and how it works with XNA Clicky Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Texture2D.GetData fails on 500x500 texture Thunder2002 wrote: Argh, thats really the solution, if its a power of 2 it works 512x512 for example, sorry for this stupid question, i had never thought that it could be such a .... thing. Is there any good reason for that I read somewhere that even if the texture is not a power of two, it will be scaled up to the closest power of two. I'm guessing it's easier for the GPU to process. Then again, everything on computers is based off binary. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Tint programatically a Texture2D with another Texture2D Thanks for your answers. I will try to be more explicit. This is a 2D application. Let's imagine that I have a furniture catalogue with 30 different elements and these elements can be made in 10 different types of wood. If I have to use a graphic tool to do the work, I will have to create 300 images which is out of my skill, patience and time. I was wondering if there is a way in XNA or that can be incorporated in an XNA game, to do it by program, that is, to render the Texture2D that represents the chair and tint it. In my case the tint is a little different from the one provided by the SpriteBatch.Draw (Texture2D, Rectangle, Color) method. Instead of using a color to tint I want to use another Texture2D. I hope this is now clearer. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Game studio Express particle system? This is the only nearly complete system I know of - http://www.codeplex.com/mpe Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.
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    - Shader states, etc? (HLSL effects not working right) Here is a random fix for you based on that HLSL has different layout of the matrix data than XNA. Was actually my first though on the matter but I wrote the normalization thing first. Hopefully this will work. If not..combine them...if it still doesn't work then...hmm...dunno... effect.Parameters[ "viewInverse" ].SetValueTranspose( Matrix .Invert( _view ) ); Oh, and are you sure your texture came into XNA correctly. You should do some testing with that aswell. Tag: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio! Game Technologies: DirectX, XNA, XACT, etc.

KleMiX

I've made simple framework and app to build content without Game Studio, find it here.

Thanks to Shawn about hint how to do it and thanks RSDN Magazine about great article about how MSBuild works.

Re: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio!

Knight99

Awesome. Thanks for posting it. I am using it as an example for my own editor.

Re: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio!

Gloei

wow, great work. This is exactly what I need. A friend of me wants to help with creating some assets (anims/models) for my little game, but he shouldn't have to install GSE, get my whole source project, and build everything by hand each time just to do some testing/evaluating.

If I understand correctly I can either have him use your XCB GUI, or with a bit of effor I can even create a standalone, easy to use, tool myself using your XCB framework. That's really cool, and flexible. Good job :)

Re: XNA Framework XNA Content Builder - Build you content without Game Studio!

Michael Hansen

allso take look at this tread

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=1059538&SiteID=1