Upgrade for XNA in April

Good news, fans of .net. Better news, fans of videogame programming. Best news of all, XNA geeks. XNA goes into its first upgrade.

You can read the whole post here. However we are going to highlight some things of this new upcoming version. Before we get started, however, let me thank the XNA team for their effort on meeting the community requirements after the XNA 1.0 Release. Now let me highlight some of the issues fixed or added to this new1.1 Release.

The most important fix, if any fix was needed on the XNA GSEE, is full support for Windows Vista installation. Though many users found their way in the installation on Vista, now XNA GSEE 1.1 will be installed on Vista without problems. That doesn’t mean, however, that 1.1 will enable DirectX 10 programming. For that (if it comes) we will have to wait a bit longer.

Also many other features have been added to the Framework. We will see them all more clearly on the release (for now the note is not quite expressive) but one of the most interesting additions is the bitmap based font rendering, completely lacking onthe previous release. Also, improvements have been done on the Math API, what may include some better performance, but not really much increase in functionality.

Also the Content Pipeline has received some loving care, especially in loadin, cleaning and reading in parts (vertex and index) on Models.

Finally, the XBOX360 compatibility layer and deploymentline have been simplified and extended in some ways. Now we can see game thumbnails when deploying on XBOX360 and test and connectmore easily the XBOX360 and the PC. Moreover, now games can be deployed into self-extracting packages either for PC or XBOX360 (one for each) and be hosted as a single file on websites, emailed, etc…

Many improvements on the sides of the Framework upwards, but few (at least few expected) on the framework downwards. If you had a non-compatible card (not supporting Shader Model 1.1 or higher) you’d better get buying a new one. I did last week, and for about 55 € got a nice (not perfect) graphic card to test my beautiful blue-screened game.

Gone with the wind

Yesterday was a very good day, if it wasn’t for the weather, as The Corrs would sign. It was a terrible weather with winds of more than 100 km/h blowing up. This is the picture they have left in the park just in front of my house

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As you can see the wind was really strong. It’s usual to have windy marchs here, but not so windy. Proofs of climate change? Many coincidences to say it is not as hard as it seems.

XNAing everything

Again in my break of Wednesdays I’d like to review what my project of “Games and Virtual Reality” is going to be.

It’s always fun to test new tools, specially when it’s not only that you are new to the tool, but that the tool in itself is new too. That’s how I feel about XNA. But moreover, XNA is a very simple, wide-ranged Framework, primarili targeted against non-professional programmers and learners. Of course, you can make pretty good-looking commercial games with it, but the geeks like me prefer to see it as a geek tool.

My project is a very simple one, a simple puzzle-platforms game of a country man fighting against the animals of the farm, that have taken the town. If you are from Spain, you may know it, “Gañán 5.0” is its name, and is based on a popular character of a late-night show, very funny.

I’ve used XNA for a while, I’m following closely (and helping as much as I can) in developing Mono.Xna for the Open Source community, but I have never started a proper project with it. Now is the time. And with a team! Great!

We are now leaving behind the requirements rehearshal phase and are focusing on class definition and implementation. Soon our first prototypes will be out. Hopefully in no more than two weeks. By June, the whole project must be finished, lacking some bug-fixing and little enhacements.

The bad thing is that I’ll have to buy a new graphic card before than I expected. Mine is requiring replacement (it’s been requiring it for quite a long time) but I wanted to wait for the cheap nVida G80 coming on in summer with DirectX 10 support. But since I’m not going to install Vista at the moment there is no need for that.

4th week starts

In just five more minutes my new week will start. The fourth week in the second quarter at the university. We are getting ready to start too much projects and the bog part of them is design. I’m still struggling with UML and the requirements and implementation design, but little by little I grow in understanding of it. I must, for there are many projects opened that must be closed in June to pass this degree.

First, just in five minutes, we will present the pre-project document of the new game my Game-programming team intends to do. It will be done in XNA, the new technology of Microsoft (now being extended to the Open Source community by Mono and Mono.Xna) for programming videogames.

Other opened project is the design of a website, probably written on php, although I am still deciding whether to use asp and javascript or completely AJAX.

More than that, two more projects, one of design of a big enterprise application of my choice (I don’t know what to choose) and the implementation of it, are the main projects of other two items.

So, if I manage to pass all this, then I will be the master of UML design and .net implementation of it for the rest of my existence. Does anybody want to interview me for a job? XD

Mono 1.2.3 (.1)

I know I should have written before about this, but I did not have much information on the next release of Mono till today.

The facts are that it’s almost a month since the last release of Mono (1.2.3) and I upgraded as usual as soon as I saw the post on www.go-mono.com. It works good, as usual, but many new things have been added to Mono on this version and I am going to focus a bit on them.

First and foremost, the mos important and interesting thing is that Mono is now supporting Visual Basic 8.0. The question all may be asking now is… “was not mono supporting any .net language since it is a standard based version of the runtime?” The basic answer is yes, but no, but yes. “What?” Let me explain.

Being a standard-based runtime+tools, Mono allows any assembly compiled against .net to run on it. Therefore we were more than able to write our program with Visual Basic 8.0 and compile it wit Visual Studio, for instance, and afterwards using that very .exe file or .dll with Mono on, for instance, openSUSE. However trying to write solutions and projects with Visual Basic on Linux would not be just as easy. The problem was that we required a good compiler, and we lacked it.

Now, one of the improvements of Mono 1.2.3 is that we have that tool. In fact, with Monodevelop 0.13 we can now build solutions written in Visual Basic 8.0. For me this is a minor goal, because I just love C#ing everyting, but since the Visual Basic community is so big, many people will now be able not just to port or migrate applications from Windows to Linux, but to build real cross-platform applications either on Linux or Windows… or both!

As usual since Mono 1.1.1, this release comes with a new release of MoMA, the Mono Migration Analyzer. This simple tool allows a developer to test the functions and classes their assembly use, and check if it is already implemented on Mono. Class and function support (especially on cross-platform libraries) is now the main goal of Mono.

The release notes of this release may add more to the information I provide in this post, but some of the big improvements are being made on ASP.NET 2.0, which is almost complete at the moment, fixes on the already finished Windows.Forms library, allowing compatibility 100% with .net 1.1 and some extensions of 2.0, and others.

The project is really moving forward to complete the goal of having in the 2nd/3rd quarter of the year a fully .net 2.0 compatible version. Also, but not included (not even in preview mode) in this release, the Mono team and the whole community has started working on the .net 3.0 extensions. Hopefully we will see soon a Mono with WCF and a bit later WPF working on any platform.

Monodevelop 0.13

Last week Monodevelop gave a new step forward in order to get to the 1.0 Release. Monodevelop 0.13 has been released with lots of new features that make even more enjoyable the use of this IDE for development under Linux over Mono.

One of the most important features Monodevelop 0.13 adds is the total compatibility with Visual Studio 2005 solutions. This was one of the main goals set for the upcoming 1.0 release, and is now working well. Of course, more work needs to be done in this feature, but for anyone used to the Visual Studio IDE and having projects made with it, migrating to Monodevelop now must be much easier.

Another feature which has got my undivided attention is the built-in manager for repositories. That is a major add-in to the Monodevelop IDE. Now, without having to use external tools, the Monodevelop IDE allows the developer to be always connected to the latest update of the repository and send the changes immediately after they have been made. In other words, Monodevelop is turning into a Team Suite.

The best thing you can do if you want to see the improvements on the IDE, as always, is to get the latest Monodevelop and try it, and you can leave a comment afterwards.