Bacon And Blood
Catalin “Belgian Blue” Zima reflects about his 2009. Glenn “Gloucester” Wilson samples the touches, George G. “Dølafe” Clingerman touches the samples and Joel “Gloucester” Martinez touches smoothly.
Meanwhile, on a Saturday night at 2:20 Pieter “Dajal” Germishuys talks about drinking coffee. The day after Andy “Blonde d'Aquitaine” Dunn runs 50 miles.
Chris G. “Red Angus” Williams fears small people, frags for charity and Goerge W. “Dølafe” Clingerman downplays his contribution.
[Ed.: Somehow the relevance of the subjects actions of this very series is not what it used to be, resulting in a sort of dilemma of what to actually share here. Today's nick names ain’t the most inspired either…]
Depth And Games
Matt “Blitzkrieg” Pettino fights with the depth buffer and Charles “One” Humphrey flags bits in XNA.
Meanwhile, George W. “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” Clingerman stares at walls, not goats and Chris G. “Fade to Black” Williams says Good Night.
Glenn “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” Wilson installs the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP finally, Jon “Escape” Watte releases a beta of kW X-port 1.4.5 for 3DS Max 2010 and in a desperate move Andy “Harvester of Sorrow” Dunn begs for common sense to be applied during peer review. Following the lead of desperation, Iñaki “Whiplash” Ayucar fulminates against clones, strongly.
John “Motorbreath” Sedlak has a new jacket, with a back, plays games, writes cryptic code. Joel “Ride the Lightning” Martinez loves LINQ and threats to release a game. Finally, Chad “Hit the Lights” Carter is a happy daddy.
The Sheep And The Butcher
Joel “Desperation” Martinez fears the loathing in FarmVille. Chad “Rage” Carter discovers that all men are created unequal, while Jim “Thinner” Perry doesn’t. In between Chris G. “The Gunslinger” Williams ponders alternative careers and recommends Dead Girl.
Catalin “The Colorado Kid” Zima is impressed by the hidden gems in talks performed by The Shawn, which raises the interests of one Andy “The Regulators” Dunn. Pieter “The New Lieutenant's Rap” Germishuys is happy about the current evolution of the software industry.
Richard “Roadwork” Thomson will be presenting 3 sessions during the upcoming Utah Code Camp (free, upcoming being March 27th, 2010).
Meanwhile, John “Stationary Bike” Sedlak gets spiritual and George W. “Dreamcatcher” Clingerman is asleep.
The Brotherhood
Catalin “Gone Green” Zima recycles posts on Sgt. Conker to feature John “Snow Shovel Master” Sedlak once again.
Jon “Last of the Mohicans” Watte ponders the future of PC gaming and is reflecting about the quality of his subtle way to ask questions.
Andy “Master Of The Brotherhood” Dunn will not put Chris G. “Walk Like An Egyptian” Williams onto his list, but onto the Adult Friend Finder one.
Chad “I Wrote Some Books” Carter encourages the Sarge to pick up SBARG again.
Vincente “Works On Boring Things” Cartas lobbies for Phil “The Quiet Veteran” Bourke (and so do we: IGDA members vote for Phil!).
Loïc “Epsicode And Not-A-MVP” Dansart (the Little Gamers: Teh Game chap) dropped the 1st public screenshot of his Dream Build Play entry.
Glenn “Legendary Seeker” Wilson seeks reasons for an academic XNA Code Camp in Victoria.
Performance Testing, Gesture Recognition and Template Exporter
Kris Steele talks about his experience with performance testing while developing his XNA Game.
The new version of FGF (0.1.2.0) was released, and contains Gesture Recognition capabilities. Read all about them on John Sedlak's site.
Stephen Styrchak posted the source code to his Template Exporter on codeplex, and then posted an explanation about what StartupObject is and how it should be handled when exporting project templates.
About Language
Iñaki “Visionary” Ayucar starts the week with an introduction to or of (depending on whom [or is it who?] you ask) Extension Methods and why they rock and why you most certainly want to use them for, like, everything.
On a bright Tuesday morning, George W. “The Giant” Clingerman pushes some very dark clouds onto the sky by publicly expressing his strong feelings for regions to organize code (that’s a +1e100 reputation thing; As a service for your memory: regions were introduced to hide the verbose, designer create code blobs in Windows Forms et al. when C# did not support partial classes.), finding a strong supporter in Vincente “1.8” Cartas.
To break the flow here’s a tiny, tiny photo of the XNA MVPs at the MVP Summit 2010:
Photo © 2010 Microsoft Corporation
Benjamin "The Invisible Yet Photographable MVP" Nitschke has some more photos from the Summit in Seattle 2010 (that’s the year of the happening, not the number of photos…).
John “Don’t Quote That” Sedlak playstests games.
Pedro D. “Talking Head” Güida has been granted a MAP award (yep, that’s right: there’s a “Microsoft Active Professional” award program for “professionals who are considered to be among the top 5% of most active contributors in the community”, which, basically, translates to “You talk a lot”).
Elsewhere, Andy “Sparkly Crown Jewels” Dunn and Chris G. “Fighter” Williams (who’s already on the meet the team page [hrm, when did that one get updated? Lat I looked, which was not that long ago, it featured fewer members…]) go commando in support of VB.NET, while Jim “Reads a Legend” Perry stays on the other side of the fence (or so). Later, after the dust of the epic and never ending battle settled, Chris G. “Equalizer” Williams embraces all languages (but not PHP).
The best news to last: George W. “Dance Time” Clingerman found his awesome back.
Sing And Read
SCENE XXI
The well-known ventspace.
Enter Promit “I Can’t Dance” Roy.
Roy. I wrote this a while back and I keep losing it. Maybe now that it’s here, it won’t get lost again.
Sing along The Eye of the Coder.
Exeunt.
SCENE XXII
The blog of one John.
Enter John “I See Dead Beetles” Sedlak.
John. If you hate reading the XNA Forums because of the low contrast and overly wide style, there is good news. I have managed to rewrite a bit of the CSS to drastically increase the readability of threads. As an added bonus, your overall experience on the forum will be better. The modifications were done using the Personalized Web plugin for Chrome, but it works just as well in similar plugins for Firefox (I was testing in the Web Developer plugin).
Share the code and some before and after screens.
Exit.
Buzz And Contact
SCENE XIX
Twitter.
Enter Richard “Philosopher” Thompson.
Richard. Having the Blues http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/fractals/fotd/2008/10/2008.10.11-Having_the_Blues.jpg
Richard. A Hole in One http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/fractals/fotd/2008/10/2008.10.10-A_Hole_in_One.jpg
Richard. "With collections, the Null Object Pattern is free--you just return an empty collection."
Exeunt.
Enter John “Integrator” Sedlak.
John. Wow. I actually enjoy reading the CCO forums now!!
Enter Jim “Conservator” Perry.
Jim. @jsedlak so you're a masochist?!? 8\
John. @NemoKrad NICE! I am going to look at that tomorrow. Can I integrate it into FGF? http://jsedlak.org/fgf
Exeunt John and Jim.
Enter George W. “Reflector” Clingerman.
George. At some point I really should do a Kissy Poo post-mortem. Things we did right, but there's quite a few things I wish we had done differently
Enter Andy “Instructor” Dunn.
Andy. @Kitt1e2009 : Unless he has a 'scale to fit' then yes… for the icons on the right mainly (assuming the red box is correclty [sic] positioned)
Exit.
George. @The_Zman @Kitt1e2009 "assuming the red box is correctly positioned" is why I suggest you only fail if you're actually experiencing it
Exit.
SCENE XX
Enter Charles “Responder” Humphrey.
Charles. I am pretty sure, that like me you are more than capable of scanning the web for snippets of info on how to do this, well I thought, to save you the time and effort I’ll put up a simple how-to here.
Explain the code.
Charles. And that’s about it, hope you find it useful. The solution for this post can be found here. As ever C&C welcome.
Exit.
Display Orientation on the ZuneHD
John Sedlak has two posts about using his FGF framework while working on the Zune HD and dealing with orientation.
He talks about how to support rotating and resizing of the display on the Zune HD (which supports both landscape and portrait gaming) and then continues with more explanations.