Kalamus Project ~ XNA 4 on VB .NET - Fun with Particles!

He's done it again, folks! Kalamus1 is mastering XNA's particle engine! This is his first demonstration of particle effects. Regrettably, I'm recording at work and didn't get to capture the thunder claps that follow the flashes of lightning. Boo! Needless to say, it's awesome! :-D

Stay tuned - there's more to come!

Kalamus' Project ~ XNA 4 - Procedural Tile Map Generation, A* Pathfinding, & Selectable MiniMap

This in an awesome "Work In Process" that belongs to Kalamus.

So far he's added the following:
   - Procedural Tile Map Generation (On Key Press)
   - A* Path Finding
   - A Minimap interface that can navigate the world map
   - A debug menu
   - Dead Sexy, Animated Menus
   - Water animation cycle
   - Kalamus' Adaptation of Mango Screen Management
   - A clean, smooth class flow that I REALLY need to adopt...

I'm ever grateful and indebted for being given the opportunity to learn from this guy! :-D

Project 4 - XNA Toon Movement, Map Triggers for Map Loading ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

Work In Process - Project 4:
Rad Marvin rides again! I have added character movement, tile blocking, and map triggers to load new maps/teleport and reposition the toon.
I also have working sound (not featured in this video because I'm recording at work :-P ).

Project 3 - XNA Simple Title Screen and Animated Tile Map ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 3:
Today, I worked on setting up a very simple title screen and world map. When you press "ENTER", it then loads the world map, complete with basic water animation, and a welcome dialog using my Text Processor class from Project 1.

I'm using 16x16 tile textures drawn at 32x32 on a 512x448 (SNES format) screen.

I still have a bit of improving to do on my text processor. I want to create enumerated screen type templates to automatically choose the backdrop style and location.

After that, I need to reformat my battle processor to fit the screen more dynamically.

Project 2 - XNA Classic RPG Style Battle System ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 2:
I'm working on a simple *riiiiight* battle system that will be similar to the classic NES "Dragon Warrior". Naturally, I hope to add more glitz and glamor in the future. For now, I just want it to be functional. I'm presently displaying the creature stats just to show that their entity class is updating successfully.

~ NOTE ~
I will eventually be releasing tutorials and source code for these projects.

Project 1 - XNA Text Processor & Menu Classes ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 1:
I'm building a text processor class to handle game dialog.
It's large and sloppy but I wanted the "typing stream" effect instead of instant print.

~ NOTE ~
I will eventually be releasing tutorials and source code for these projects.

XNA 4 In Visual Basic 2010 - Part 2 - SpriteFonts & Tile Mapping With The SpriteBatch

This beginner Visual Basic Game Programming tutorial is designed to help you get started with XNA 4.

In this VB video we'll be covering:
Adding a SpriteFont to our project
Creating a frame counter and drawing it to the screen with the SpriteBatch
Adding a tileset to our game content
Drawing a basic tile map with the SpriteBatch

Visual Basic Beginner Game Programming Tutorial ~ Music and Sound with mciSendString

This video will teach you how to play multiple sounds, simultaneously, by creating a sound class and employing MCISendString in Visual Basic 2010. This can be very useful for apps or games. :-)

We'll be covering how to play sounds, volume control, and how to kill running sounds.

XNA 4 In Visual Basic 2010 - Part 1 - Project Creation & Graphics Initialization

This beginner Visual Basic Game Programming tutorial is designed to help you get started with XNA 4.

In this VB video we'll be covering:
XNA Project Creation
Graphics Initialization
Preparing The Game Screen

clsContent Code: http://www.xnatutor.com

You must have XNA 4 (contained in the Windows Phone SDK 7.1) Installed to follow this video.

Download the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27570

System Requirements:
Windows 7, Windows Vista
Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2 -- all editions except Starter Edition
Windows 7 (x86 and x64) -- all editions except Starter Edition
Installation requires 4 GB of free disk space on the system drive.
3 GB RAM
Visual Basic (Visual Studio 2010) (SP1 Recommended)

Connecting to a MySQL Database with VB.NET Using ADO.NET

In this Visual Basic 2010 programming tutorial, we'll be connecting to and pulling data from a MySQL database, utilizing the ADO.NET connector provided at http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/

In this video, we will perform the following tasks:
1.) Creating the Connection Objects, a Connection String, and a Query String
2.) Connecting to our MySQL Database
3.) Drawing Data from our Database to our Windows Form
4.) Filtering our query results, and sorting the data
5.) Creating a Table Relationship to pull data from multiple tables
6.) Disconnecting from the Database

This tutorial assumes that you already have an operable MySQL database, access to the database, and a basic working knowledge of your database.

Trying to stay on task...

Wow... So many new goodies to play with and so very little time.

Sorry, if the updates are coming a bit slowly. The four dollars I've made via Google over the past few years just isn't quite enough to allow me to quit my day job. ;-)

So, work has had me really busy, and in my little bit of spare time I've been trying to diversify my talents by learning PHP with MySQL, exploring XNA with VB and trying to memorize the basic configuration, trying to support old tutorials, and considering ideas for new tutorials.

I know, I know... Just more excuses, right? :-P

Well, I have been working on another tutorial, though it's not quite as "game-centric" as the others. Actually, it is - but it isn't. I'll be outlining the very, very basics of employing a database (MySQL) for things like user account storage. While it promises to be a very elementary video, I will not be outlining MySQL configuration, and will expect that you already have an operable database and know how to create and manage your own tables. All I will be demonstrating is how you can connect to it with VB.NET using the ADO.NET driver.

In the first video we'll focus on:
1.) Establishing a connection to a MySQL database with Visual Basic 2010
2.) Accessing table data
3.) Joining two tables with SQL to access relational data (TOONS by USER ACCOUNT)
4.) Closing the connection

Depending upon how this tutorial is received, future videos may go a bit deeper and may include record insertion and whatnot.

Sooo, that's where I'm at, right now.

Take care, and thank you for stopping by! :-)

Aardaerimus

XNA is on the way!!! *HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY*

The XNA over VB barrier has finally been shattered - many thanks to Kalamus1 for his demonstration and for pointing me to a tremendous new resource by rm2kdev: http://www.xnatutor.com/


I still have a long road of learning ahead of me to fully understand and transition my older works to XNA, but I'm thinking that it will be a huge benefit to us all.

With GDI+ I was putting up with frame rates of around 22FPS - at super low resolution even - and many users were bogging down to around 1FPS... When Kalamus1 sent me my own tutorial source adapted to XNA, I totally freaked! My shoddy 22 FPS had exploded to nearly 4000FPS!

The next test was to run the project at full screen. It scaled up very nicely and was still blazing along at around 3000FPS.

Mind you, this was on my monster quad-core workhorse computer at work. The next test would be to execute the project on my older dual-core laptop, at home. The results were still a screaming 2400 FPS!

Keep in mind that most production games will be ticking along at significantly slower speeds. Playing World of Warcraft, for instance, I'm lucky to be getting between 25-35 FPS, and it's still smooth. People with souped up machines and high-end video cards might be enjoying between 60-120 FPS on modern games.

With that in mind, even 1000 FPS would be ridiculous. Of course, this should decline steeply as the complexity of  our code routines grow, and in some instances we might even be forced to limit the FPS to a fixed rate, but at least we can shed the nagging concern that our apps may well give an abysmal performance on machines that may not have been as gutsy as the primary development environment.

Another VB Game Programming Tutorial ~ Creating Classes and Managing Object Arrays

This Visual Basic programming tutorial is designed to complement my Visual Basic Game Programming series, but is not limited to game design. It is designed to teach you how to create a custom VB Object Class, store your class to an object array, then create and delete multiple instances of that class on the fly.

In this VB programming video, we will be performing the following tasks:
1.) Building a simple game/application loop
2.) Build a (GDI+) graphical interface for painting objects to the main form
3.) Build a custom class with graphical properties and embedded timer objects and self-contained events
4.) Teach the objects to interface with the form environment while remaining autonomous
5.) Create a class/object array to store a desired number of objects from our class
6.) Use random numbers to dynamically generate new and diverse instances of our custom class
7.) Destroy specific objects by deleting them from our array when certain conditions are met.

PROJECT SOURCE CODE: http://www.aardaerimus.com/downloads/classtutorial/