I'm doing a session at Dev Days next week in their Geek Night slot. It is on XNA, and so I thought I'd have a play with "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" and get it running on the Zune.
Took 30 minutes.
Took another 20 to make the game play a random music track and display a spectrum analyzer as the music plays. Great stuff. I'm really looking forward to the talk now..
Hot salad death with music and cheese.
I was overjoyed to find last week that Waterstones bookshop in Hull had a copy of my book in stock.
I was less overjoyed to discover this week that the copy is still there. Now I'm fretting as to why nobody has bought it. Of course, they might have sold hundreds and kept refilling the shelf.
But I doubt it.
I got a royalty cheque yesterday and so there must be some copies selling somewhere, but I'd love for the one in my home town (so to speak) to sell as well.
All that work. Just for this!
I've got my Zune working on my newly fettled PC. To celebrate I've made the screen go all blue (actually this is the default project). Time to get some cheese in there methinks.
You know you've made it big when you are in Micro Mart. At the end of yesterday's lecture I was shown a picture of my ugly mug staring out of page 94 of issue 997 of Micro Mart magazine. It was part of an article about Social Gaming, and I had been quoted saying sensible things about XNA (I must have been caught on one of my "sensible days" - which are getting fewer and further between these days).
Of course I shot over to the Students Union and bought a copy of the magazine (incidentally, and I've no idea why this should be the case, but our Students Union shop has an absolutely fantastic range of magazines. There are titles there that I've had bother finding in other places. Kudos.)
Anyhoo, I like the magazine. And not just because it has me in it. For a weekly magazine it has some very good editorial content and it made a very good lunchtime read. Of course the downside is that it also has lots of adverts for stuff, and so it might have proved a rather expensive purchase.....
Find out how here.
According to this very good blog post, where there is passion there are also T-shirts.
You can now get Very Silly Games merchandise from Cafe Press. Including T-shirts.
I now have a new hero, Jerry V (Gamertag: Xyjar). He has only gone and produced a stunning video of a Gamepad racer session, complete with rocking soundtrack.
The start of the race (I love the way he has used XNA books to prop up the table!)
For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, Gamepad racer is a very silly Xbox 360 game where you just make the gamepads vibrate down a slope. You can find the source for the game here. You can find Jerry's video here. Thanks for that, you've really made my day.
Very Silly Games is kind of picking up speed, and you can buy my book in the UK and in the US (although Amazon UK seem to have sold out).
So when Craig suggested that I set up a Facebook group for Very Silly Games I thought I'd have a go. Not being a particularly sociable person, I'm not sure how this social networking actually works, but if it gets people writing silly games then I'm all for it.
If you want to be socially silly with XNA, you can sign up here. You stil have a chance to win a copy of the book with your best Gamepad racer video.
Oh well, best laid plans and all that.
The good news is that my book is now available from Amazon.com. The bad news is that it has already attracted two unfavourable reviews. The worse news is that nobody has actually read it yet.
The problems started when it was decided to not include CD-ROMS with the book itself. This is actually quite sensible in a way. Since you need a network connection to actually use XNA on an Xbox 360 it seemed reasonable to drop the content and make it available on-line. And at least that way we could ensure that the content was up to date.
But not before the Amazon blurb (and Barnes and Noble too) had gone out with the promise of shiny disks. Not surprisingly the early adopters (the ones whose opinions are most important) have heartily slammed the book for not delivering on the promise. I can understand where they are coming from too. If I'd bought something which was mis-described like this I'd be angry too.
I think this is really a failure of process. Microsoft Press and Amazon (et all) should have a proper mechanism whereby when the description of an item changes all the existing purchasers of the item are informed of the change and given the option to back out of the purchase. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to have been caught like this. But it still hurts.
Last week Bill Gates (you might have heard of him - used to run a software company as I remember) announced a new Microsoft initiative called DreamSpark. This gives all students (even those unlucky enough to be at places which are not in the Microsoft Academic Alliance) access to free Microsoft software, including Visual Studio 2008 professional, Windows Server 2005 and Microsoft Expression Studio. And they also provide students with free 1 year XNA creators club memberships. You just have to go on to the site and sign up. If your institution isn't listed as one of the authenticating places (for some reason Hull is not on the list) you can use your Athens username (which all Hull students have) to get access.
To find out how to do it you can read more at Ed Dunhil's blog, where he describes the process. I've just tested it (don't ask me how) and it works fine.
This is wonderful, since it means that any student with an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live membership can now write games for their console. And with the upcoming community developments it means that in the slightly longer term they will be able to publish them out to everyone on Xbox Live.
I wish Microsoft sold Zune in Europe. The Zune does what an iPod does, but better. The screen is bigger and it has network sync, so that you can get content, including recorded TV, off your media PC and into your pocket with no wires.
Playing a game on a Zune
And soon you will be able to write and play XNA games on it. Wonderful. The thrust at the moment is for developers, you will use the next version of XNA Game Studio, 3.0, to compile and deploy the programs.
The Zune uses a version of the .NET Compact Framework, just like the Xbox 360, and you get all the neat debugging support that you have on that platform. You also get a very healthy 16MB of program memory for your code to stretch its' legs in, which on a portable device like this is an incredible amount of space. It even works on all the Zune platforms, including the tiny diskless ones and you also get access to the media the Zune holds. You can even get information from the audio signal, so that you can create programs that respond to the beat in the songs.
I found all this out at the second XNA session of the day. They had a bunch of Zunes running a bunch of games. Of course, given the hardware constraints of the Zune device, we are not talking about huge, 3D first person shooters here, only the 2D parts of XNA are supported, but it does mean you could take the same game code and run it on PC, Xbox or mobile devices. Your games can even make use of the networking support built into Zune, so that you can create wireless games.
The first version of Game Studio 3.0 will be out in April, with the release version by the end of the year. The XNA team have been very good at keeping to their release dates, and I'm really looking forward to seeing this come out.
After lunch we had the first of two presentations that aimed to put meat on the bones of the keynote announcements yesterday. This dealt with how you will get your XNA game up onto Xbox Live Arcade so that anyone in the world can play with it.
The process is going to be community driven, with developers performing peer reviews of the content that has been submitted. Once a few of reviewers have taken a turn with your game and agreed with your game description it goes out there for the masses to play with. There is a very precise rating system, so that particular aspects of the game can be identified as "adult". There are very powerful tools available to shut down a naughty game and ban the creator, and so I think that in the situation Microsoft have made the best of a very bad job.
It would have been much simpler for them to just say "this is too scary" and walk (or perhaps run) away from the whole thing. When YouTube started up they were a comparatively small operation with nothing much to lose. They didn't have time to police their content and so nowadays you can find pretty much any kind of material up there. Microsoft are trying to do the same with games, but being a much bigger target they would be in trouble if they got this wrong. The fact that they are trying to build a workable, scaleable system to manage the content is hugely impressive. They freely admit that they don't quite know how it will turn out and some aspects of policy are not clear yet. Three things stood out for me:
The service goes live in the USA later this year for testing, with full roll out across the 'states by Christmas. Not sure when we will get it in the UK, but I'm looking forward to it.
Filling up for the keynote
Today was the first keynote day. John Schappert of Microsoft took to the stage and told us where XNA is going. The answer is everywhere. The long awaited "YouTube for gamers" is taking shape, which will make it possible for creators to put their XNA content out there for anyone to play.
John Schappert watches one of the demos.
This was nice, but nothing that had not been expected. What came next was a bit out of the blue though, in a wonderful way. Chris Mitchell came on and started talking about portable code. And showed XNA running on a Zune. Running very nicely too. This means that soon we will be able to create mobile XNA games as well as Xbox 360 ones. Very cool. XNA developers are now mobile developers too. Wahay!
This really hardened my resolve to get a new Zune (and might explain why the larger ones are suddenly harder to get hold of). Fortunately Derek had put me on to one in stock in Circuit City, so right after the keynote I was straight out for an 8 block walk up the hill to get it. And I have. And it is ace. And soon I will be able to write games for it.
There are some sessions tomorrow on how things are going to work. I'm really looking forward to them and I'll post details as soon as I know myself. This GDC just came alive for me. Wonderful stuff. And, just to make the morning perfect, I saw someone pick up and take away one of my VerySillyGames prints....
Companies come to GDC with bulging marketing budgets and brand new products to push back the frontiers of game development.
I'm here with virtually no money and Very Silly Games to promote. So, first up is to make a nice logo. My first attempt is OK, but I had to use a graphics program to produce it. My second one is created entirely within XNA, using the same font and style but rendered programmatically with added silliness. I'm going to make a tutorial on how I did it. Since I can now render text really easily I add a silly message and come up with the artwork:
So, now I have the picture I need some hard copies to distribute. Last time that we were out I noticed that the local Walgreens Pharmacy (these places seem more ubiquitous than Starbucks) has an advert in the store, 15 cents a print for 100 off. And you can upload from the internet. So it is onto the site, upload the image and ask for 100.
This works wonderfully. I don't need to pay up front, I can select the store to pick up the prints and they are ready 10 minutes after my request. I get emails along the way to keep me informed of progress. People say that the internet is transforming the way we do things. You bet.
On the way to the conference I pick up the prints and pay for them (16 dollars or so - around 8 pounds UK) and then I start dishing them out. I've got rid of around 30 or so on tables around the place and in appropriate sessions, I should be through the whole lot by the end of the week. I'm not sure how much extra traffic the site will get, but even if I only get a few more hits it was fun getting them.
The latest very silly game is on the stocks. (or should that be in the stocks). I've even got the title screen finished, as you can see above. The letters rotate and jiggle in a most engaging manner, and purists will note that the shadows for the text are in exactly the right place for all of them.
Clever eh?
Now all I need to do is write the game itself....
Well, actually, not here. They are at VerySillyGames. These are actually the PDF files for chapters 1 and 2 that went to the printers. I've also included all the sample code so that you can make yourself a moodlight. I've posted them in celebration of the fact that the book is now being printed, ready for a release towards the end of Feb.
I've finally got around to launching verysillygames properly. The new site has downloads, an FAQ and all sorts. I'd love to know what you all think, and if you have any ideas for content let me know.
Coming to all good book shops....
I've been uber-busy over Christmas and New Year getting the last parts of the book sorted out and preparing the sample programs (all 54 of them) for the companion web site. Today I got the final design for the cover, which I think is really cool. I've asked for one tiny change, to remove the S from the middle of my name. It works for Hunter S. Thompson, but I don't really have enough syllables in my name (not to mention writing ability) to carry off a middle initial just yet. The book will be going to print real soon, and should be in the shops by March.
This is a bit later than we had planned, but I think it is the first XNA 2.0 book out there, which is nice.
I got the front matter stuff for the book back from for approval today. I'd contrived to get the name of the commissioning editor wrong and misspell Acknowledgements. Ho hum.
The release version of XNA 2.0 is now available for download from the XNA Creators Club. This means that the XNA 2.0 beta was actually only around a month or so, which I reckon is just how long a beta period should be. This version lets Creators Club members run Version 2.0 games on their Xbox 360s an also provides networking support for games, including Xbox to PC gaming.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
