Software Expressions

Well, I’m new to the XNA world, as well as the 3d animation world. My goal here is to put together the necessary pieces for developing a game. I’m attempting to piece together the puzzle for building some specific types of games using XNA. My primary focus is platform games using a 3D engine. The BulletX library seems to hold some pretty good potential, and I have a demo working for that. The next thing I’d like to do is start pulling in some characters into the physics world. Using XNA, a physics engine, and high polygon count characters is not a winning combination for performance, but my objective is to explore the concepts. For 3d character animation I was referred to www.daz3d.com, competitor to Poser. Daz3D is free, they make their money selling models, poses, clothing, plugins, etc. The tool is amazing, I will say that (given that I’m new to this). I am impressed with how easy it is to create an animating character and transition between poses. However, it’s very hard to do it well.

Daz3d has Aiko and Victoria as free downloadable character models for Daz3d, as well as some clothes, hair and a few poses. The next objective is to get this into an XNA application and into the content pipeline. My googling has led me to: AnimationComponents on CodePlex. I’ll have to see what comes of that. Looks like it can read BioVision files and Daz3d exports BioVision files, which is a good sign. There are a few things I hope to accomplish with AnimationComponents: 1) Get the model into my XNA application and rendered; 2) Get this working with the clothing, textures, bumpmaps and alphamaps; 3) Update the models parameters in my application to walk, and jump; 4) Apply collision shapes to the model so the model is able to interact with my physics world.

The XNA ACL library tutorials are well done. They have a dwarf character with several animating poses, idle, run, walk, and others. The tutorials take you through getting the dwarf to display, running an animating pose, making the dwarf move around using the keyboard, including walking and runnning, and then also how to blend controllers so the transition from idle to walk to run is convincing. ACL works with a skeletal structure, so it seems it would work well with Daz3d exports.

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I try not to make a habit of including links on my blog, but this is really impressive. Physics are integral to almost any kind of game development. This site, myphysicslab.com provides excellent math for rubber-bands, springs, gravity, rigid body collision, impulse and inertia. What would be nice is to integrate this math into a base sprite class.

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It appears as if there is no timer available for Silverlight. I noticed two options that were utilized; one was using the Storyboard as a timer and another was using System.Windows.Browser.HtmlTimer. Although this causes an obsolete warning, it does work in Silverlight Alpha 1.1, and from some comments on a CodeProject page it looks as if some other timer will become available in the future. So for now I’m going to be using the HtmlTimer to provide the heartbeat for sprites.

   1:  using System.Windows.Browser;

   2:   

   3:  public class WorldBase

   4:  {

   5:      private HtmlTimer _heartBeat = new HtmlTimer();

   6:      private int _beatsPerSecond;

   7:      private DateTime _lastBeat;

   8:   

   9:      public WorldBase()

  10:      {

  11:          _lastBeat = DateTime.Now;

  12:          _heartBeat.Interval = 50;

  13:          _heartBeat.Tick += new EventHandler(_heartBeat_Tick);

  14:          _beatsPerSecond = 50;

  15:          _heartBeat.Enabled = true;

  16:      }

  17:   

  18:      void _heartBeat_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)

  19:      {

  20:          //Update the BeatsPerSecond

  21:          _beatsPerSecond = 1 / (DateTime.Now - _lastBeat).Seconds;

  22:          //Provide a hearbeat for the world of sprites

  23:          ...

  24:      }

  25:  }

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1. Install “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package”
2. Install “Silverlight 1.1 Alpha”
3. Install “Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1″ - 8.2 GB
4. Install “Microsoft® Silverlight™ 1.1 Alpha Software Development Kit (SDK)”
5. Optionally install “Microsoft Expression Blend 2 May Preview” - 25MB

After steps 1-4 you should be able to startup Visual Studio (Orcas) and create a new Silverlight project.

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Ari Feldman has for many years offered a free sprite library, which is now under GPL license. You can download the sprite library here. The graphics are pretty good, and they’re great to get you started. He has a complete set of the Battle of Britain (1945), a platform game, Arinoid (Ari’s ripoff of Arkanoid), Space Invaders, and a few more.

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