Thinking Differently About Software.

This weekend I thought I’d try making a complete game. The quickest way to do this was to use one of the starter kits and tweak it up. I picked the Platformer Starter Kit that comes with XNA 3.0. There’s lots missing from the starter kit this is just a short list of things I want to add in :-

• A menu system
• More levels using all the enemies
• lives
• better scoring
• a high score table
• power ups
• scrolling levels
• hazards
• shooting enemies
• enemies with different abilities

It’s rather a long list and one I could keep adding to that’s the whole point of the starter kit it’s just to get you started.  I’ve also started writing a how-to guide to accompany the game which has slowed progress a bit, but I’ve started writing XNA code again so that can only be a good thing, more soon

Last night I asked this question on Twitter :-

#xna #Csharp Question – Anyone know if bit shifting is still faster than multiply/divide in .NET? E.G. (y<<8)+(y<<6) is faster than (y*320)

But no one answered . So I wrote this quick test.

using System;
 
namespace Multiply_Test
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int c;
 
            Console.Write("Test 1 - ");
            DateTime StartTimeTest1 = DateTime.Now;
            for (int y = 0; y < int.MaxValue; y++)
                c = (y / 2);
            DateTime EndTimeTest1 = DateTime.Now;
 
            TimeSpan taken1 = new TimeSpan((EndTimeTest1.Subtract(StartTimeTest1)).Ticks);
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} Seconds",taken1.TotalSeconds));
 
            Console.Write("Test 2 - ");
            DateTime StartTimeTest2 = DateTime.Now;
            for (int y = 0; y < int.MaxValue; y++)
                c = (y >> 1);
            DateTime EndTimeTest2 = DateTime.Now;
 
            TimeSpan taken2 = new TimeSpan((EndTimeTest2.Subtract(StartTimeTest2)).Ticks);
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} Seconds",taken2.TotalSeconds));
 
            Console.WriteLine("\n\nPress Any Key...");
            Console.ReadKey(true);
        }
    }
}

And this was the result :-

Multiply Test Results

Yep still faster.

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

Well looks like I did manage to fail on the regular posting thing.

I’ve been working on the game engine just not how I thought I would. I’ve started working towards a slight adjustment on the Bert plan, Instead of the original story we used for Bert I’m going for a Zombie Survival Game. I did a quick-ish Zombie Infection Simulator based on Kevan Davis’ Original Java script.

For my version I used SystemX as a base and added a modified version of Chase & Evade from the Creators Club Online, and O.M.G. the logic SUCKS! it’s so slow that with 1000 objects the system starts off at 2fps and scales up to around 20fps when the zombie:Human ratio levels out but then slows back to 2fps as the zombies become dominant.

I’ve thought about a few things I can do to speed up the entity’s AI, it’s going to have to wait until I have the map and collision system in place.

I’ve also been researching how the game play is going to work and found some amazing Games almost all flash based but still bloody good, from Sean Cooper’s Boxhead games to Dead Frontier my main problem is how I’m going to make my game stand out from the crowd? the fact that they will be on Xbox360 and PC probably isn’t going to be enough seeing as there are a great number of games covering this genre as it is. I think I’m going to have to aim for a simple Run & Gun style for the first outing and then try to add in more details as we go.

To start with I want to keep it PC only until I get the game closer to finished and then post it up to Creators.

I’ve been trying to write this post for the past four days and keep getting side tracked. I managed to get the sprite sheet compiler to run successfully this weekend, and produced an xnb file.

The next thing is to reload that xnb file back into the editor so that I can start on the animation system editor, but I think that I’ll probably get the Workspace class to compile as well first.

With the workspace class compiling I can probably add a preview option where the editor can shell out and run the game engine, I’m still not sure how publishing to the Xbox360 will work if I’m compiling the content outside VS, this needs looking at when I get a 360.