I have various WordPress plug-ins installed for my blog but my favourite has got to be the WordPress Stats plug-in. I like to be able to keep an eye on the amount of traffic my blog gets and in particular what the most popular articles are. At the minute, it seems to be my article on a first person camera in XNA and my article about iPhone development. However, for the past month or so the plug-in hasn’t been counting visits at all. Which was a little annoying, I figured that I was either hugely unpopular or there was something up with the plug-in. Not wanting to resign to the possible truth that no one cares what I have to say, I did a little bit of searching for people having similar problems. it wasn’t difficult to turn up some results, but the answer came from the plug-in’s FAQ page on WordPress Extend as I had hoped for. Basically this plug-in depends on the wp_footer PHP function being called in your theme. Turns out, my current theme didn’t call this. All that I needed to do was add <?php wp_footer(); ?> just before the </body> tag and the plug-in began counting stats straight away. Easy fix!
Having created my own first person camera, I moved on to creating some 3D terrain for my game. I have to admit, I cheated on this a bit and just used the custom content pipeline from the XNA Creators Club’s generated geometry sample found here. For this reason, I currently do not fully understand the process of creating terrain from a height map despite despite understanding the basic theory behind it. For this reason I can’t really provide a guide as to how to code it yourself at the minute but I will hopefully be able to do this in the future.
Yesterday I wrote an article about creating a rotating video player using Silverlight 3 (see here) and I admit that there was an awful lot of text in it, so here is a list of numbered steps for you to follow with less of the rambling in between steps.
Yesterday at work, there was a talk about Silverlight 3 about its capabilities and the improvements over Silverlight 2. The talk featured demonstrations of existing applications and some step by step “how to” tutorials in which I saw how to rotate controls in 3D space and a cool Twitter reader which was made surprisingly quickly; albeit with some ready prepared code. It had been a while since I had played with Silverlight and this talk inspired me to go home and have a play about. In this article I am going to outline the steps taken to create this video player but check out this article for step-by-step instructions to create this video player.
As I previously mentioned, I plan on updating this blog with my experience of learning 3D XNA and hopefully be able to help out others doing the same as well as receive a bit of feedback and advice on how to improve the work I have done. The first section I began working on was the camera for the game. Since my game is being planned for the Xbox Live Indie Games, the tutorial below is intended to work with the Xbox 360 game pad although with a little modification it should be possible to use it on the PC.
I’ve been doing 2D XNA for about a year and a half now and I feel I’m fairly competent at it, largely due to my experience in the Imagine Cup, so over this past week or so I’ve begun working on my first 3D XNA game. I’ve had the concept for the game in my head and been thinking it through quite a lot and now I feel I am ready to begin some of the core programming. Some time in the future I may give some more details about the project but as I am aiming to get it on the Xbox Live Indie Games, I feel like I should keep quiet for now until I get a substantial amount of work done!
I’ve found the 3D work so far quite enjoyable, I’ve encountered a few strange issues and differences that you wouldn’t come across in a 3D game but that’s all part of the learning curve. I’m putting into practice a lot of the lessons I have learnt from my placement at Microsoft already in terms of class design project structure and hope to create a robust game that I should be able to maintain easily.
I plan on updating this blog as I go along with something similar to a tutorial series and will hopefully be able to fill in some the gaps that are left by some of the “How to…” and “Introduction to…” tutorials.