Today I went to OPorto to a seminar organized by Bruno Tavares, a Microsoft Student Partner from ISEP (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto). It was a great seminar. The speakers were:
Verónica Orvalho: Teacher of Computer Graphics in FCUP, full-time researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, CTO Face in Motion, developer of algorithms for 3D modeling, animation and new platforms of face characterization.
Bruno Tavares: Is a finalist of the degree in Computer Engineering in ISEP, and Microsoft Student Partner
Marco Silva: A finalist of the Master’s degree in Computer Engineering and Computation (MIEIC) in FEUP with specialization in Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence, he is also a co-founder of the Students Group of Computer Graphics (NeCG - necg.fe.up.pt), Microsoft Student Partner and Junior Flash Developer at Fullsix.
There was a lot of people on this seminar, and they were real interested about the video game industry and the whole process of game design and development. They also wanted to know what was the best approach to be successful in this field of expertise, and about technologies like XNA.
After the theoretical sessions in the morning where the subjects were the video games industry, and an introduction to XNA (with a great and simple demo of the Pong game), there was a “hand-on-lab” session where the attendees had a chance to try out XNA Game Studio 2.0 for themselves (using 2D models) with the help of our experts Bruno and Marco.
Tomorrow it will take place the second part of the seminar, with 3D game development. Good luck for tomorrow!
Apresento-vos um projecto concorrente ao Imagine Cup 2008 na categoria de Game Development.
Foi desenvolvido por uma equipa de alunos do IST na qual se incluí o MSP João Fernandes. Está muito porreiro. Foi feito em XNA 1.0. Deixo referência para o vídeo para que conheçam melhor o projecto.
Although game developing is not my area of interest and my knowledge about this field of work is reduced, I have been hearing and seeing some stuff about XNA. I’ve seen a few demos and one thing that I was curious about was how to make those 3D models which are used. In XNA tutorials, webcasts and demos generally the focus is on the developing process once we have the models.
Yesterday I spent some time searching for information and trying out some stuff. I’ll share with you those steps that allow you to create and import 3D models into XNA games.
2. Create your 3D Model. Excuse me for the awful model, but this was the first time I tried 3D Studio Max. It’s just 3 deformed spheres.
3. Export your model ( File > Export). Choose FBX file type. A settings window will open. I haven’t explored this window. The default settings worked fine for me.
4. Create a new project in XNA Game Studio 2.0 and right click the Contents item in solution explorer. Choose Add Existing Item and choose your model FBX file.
5. From this step on you can follow this tutorial: Displaying a 3d model on the Screen from Step 3: Load the Model by Using the Content Pipeline available in MSDN.
In the last few days I’ve been working with theVirtual Earth API in my spare time. I made a demo application of Virtual Earth. In this demo I used a Windows Forms application to wrap a Virtual Earth (VE) map (which is loaded in a HTML page into a WebBrowser control).
In that HTML page I added some Javascript functions that wrap the VE API in some functions which I call via the WebBrowser control. This way I can manipulate the map in Windows Forms. I’ve added support to my XBox 360 GamePad Component. You can use your game pad to pan and zoom in/out in the 2D map. You can also switch between map styles (road,aerial, hybrid, bird’s eye). This is still a developer’s toy, since you need XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed to be able to run this application. Oh, and you also need .NET Framework 3.0.
I was surprised when I found out that the beta 3D view in VE natively supports the XBox 360 controller.
The least but the last feature I added was support for Microsoft Speech. I added a welcome message, and if you say the name of a country (in English) the map moves into that country (or to be more specific, to the country name that the application understood…). I’ve achieved this by loading a XML file, which I found over the web, that contains the name of many countries (not sure if contains them all). After loading this file the code is pretty similar to my previous post about Microsoft Speech.
That’s all! I’ll be pleased to answer some doubts and hear suggestions about this demo.
This Christmas a friend gave me a Xbox wired controller. I don’t have a Xbox 360, but I wanted to try XNA development and use the controller to develop some different user-interfaces on windows-based applications. This weekend I managed to put the first pieces to work
Based on XNA framework which has support for Xbox 360 controller I built an component that you can drag and drop into your windows forms application. You can assign each control instance to a different controller (up to 4) and set the interval between hardware changes checking (the default is 100 miliseconds). This component raises events when the controller status changes. It has a general onChange event, and an event for each button, trigger and stick status change. It has also a method to control the controller vibration.
This component is not a big deal. When it is instantiated, the component creates a new thread which waits for a period of time before returning into the main thread. When it returns it checks for controller changes using the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.GamePad class. This check is made by comparing the current GamePadState with the previous one. For each change it is raised an event to which you can subscribe in your windows application. I tried to use it in a WPF application. It worked, but I had to create the component in code. It didn’t appear in the toolbox.
You can download the component source code and an example here. I added some comments into the code, but I think that it is pretty simple to understand even to people with little experience with C#. Any question/suggestion feel free to comment!
I’ve tried it in a virtual machine in order to find out the software requirements. I had to install XNA Game Studio 2.0 to put it to work… The XNA redistributable wasn’t enough. If someone can tell me how to distribute my examples with minimum software requirements I’ll be glad to hear from you
This is also a great change for you to try Visual Studio 2008, since the solution in the zip package has to be opened in VS2008. If you don’t have access to this software, or you’re having trouble migrating the code into a VS2005 environment just tell me, and I will help you out.
As soon as I develop some applications using Xbox controller I’ll publish them here in my blog.
