A few days ago, I read an article called Among Friends: How Naughty Dog Built Uncharted 2. The interesting screenshots on the third page gave me the urge to create what I call an “on-screen profiling” tool for Spring Up XNA. I talked before about profilers and how to use them to find which sections… Continue reading On-screen profiling for XNA
Category: programming
First Run on Xbox 360 : Problems and Solutions
I decided about a month ago to start working on the Xbox 360 version of Spring Up in April. I think it can be interesting to share my experience about that. Part 1 : XNA Creator Membership Basically, you just need to pay creator membership (99 € for one year in Europe), launch XNA Game… Continue reading First Run on Xbox 360 : Problems and Solutions
Backup your work with ease
We all agree that doing backups is really important to prevent dramatic data losses. I have always been pretty lazy about that topic and usually rarely backup anything, or not very often. I think the problem was that I didn’t find easy ways to do it. For my current project, I do backups nearly everyday… Continue reading Backup your work with ease
Measuring game performance : framerate is not everything
I am currently having a few problems with performance in Spring Up XNA. I have two features that are too expensive in processing power : the background effect and the computation of the preview trajectory of the ball. I know these features are not usable at this cost because as soon as I activate one… Continue reading Measuring game performance : framerate is not everything
NProf : A Simple, Efficient and Free XNA Profiler (3.1 and 4.0)
Update: I have many visitors coming here from search engines. So here is a quick update if you want to use NProf with XNA 4.0. When you run NProf with your game, if the UI of NProf stays empty after running your game, it’s because you are running a XNA 4.0 game. There is a… Continue reading NProf : A Simple, Efficient and Free XNA Profiler (3.1 and 4.0)
Box2D.XNA : a great 2D physics engine
Box2D is a 2D physics engine created by Erin Catto. On Win/Mac, I used a very early version of Box2D (it was released nearly two years ago!). I just made a few specific changes for the game. Of course, as I told in a previous article, XNA games must be made in C# and Box2D… Continue reading Box2D.XNA : a great 2D physics engine
Video : Level Editor
I am mostly working on the level editor. I was not sure when I started this project that I would need a specific level editor. But Spring Up! X360 needs some serious changes in the level design to improve the quality and to adapt to the X360 platform, therefore I need this new level editor.… Continue reading Video : Level Editor
Win/Mac and X360 differences (3) : XNA Content Pipeline
In this post, I’ll talk about the XNA Content Pipeline. When I first tried to load a resource in the XNA game, I was trying to do as usual : opening a file and reading it using standard file reading functions. However, on XNA you have to use the Content Pipeline provided and to be… Continue reading Win/Mac and X360 differences (3) : XNA Content Pipeline
Win/Mac and X360 differences (1) : C++ and C#
I will write a series of posts about the differences in developing for Windows (or Mac) and working for X360 with XNA Game Studio. The first post of these series is about the most obvious difference : the programming language. All my PC and Mac games were developed in C++ because that’s the language I’m… Continue reading Win/Mac and X360 differences (1) : C++ and C#
First Screenshot of Spring Up! on XNA
Here is the first screenshot of Spring Up! XNA. It was made using a windows build of the XNA project. Click to Enlarge This screenshot was taken two days ago, just before starting to work on the game and physics code. Here, the rendering components and textures are properly imported to XNA. Background generation is… Continue reading First Screenshot of Spring Up! on XNA