James Wynn

Not that its news, but XNA along with a membership to the XNA Creators Club allows developers to create games in a unified system for both Windows and XBox 360. Although XNA uses C#, which I personally had reservations against, it is actually quite easy to develop on and even fun to use. XNA has now abated these reservations about C# and has persuaded me to try to port my project to the 360.

With sound, networking, a solid widely used gamepad interface, and excellent graphics capabilities the XNA platform seems ideal for small games development. The only reservations still present are against the relative immaturity of the community (as opposed to Ogre’s which is superb) and the lack of distribution mechanisms. The distribution problem is slated to be resolved with a rating system within the developer community, but this just comes back to the other problem.

There is, still, a significant amount of community generated content for learning and using XNA, but I worry about the platform if it does not attract a higher concentration of mature developers. We shall see.

The Feb ‘05 edition of Game Developer Magazine had an article titled “Late-Binding Data” and described an extremely useful mechanism for automatically reloading data into a game engine dynamically when the data has been changed.  It detects when a file has been updated and repopulates the data throughout the system.  So, an image/model can be exported from some other program and the results will be immediately visible in the game. No reloading!

This sounds like a huge time saver in the long run, but right now its turning into a significant time sink.  I figure if this functionality would be useful in my personal project, it would likely be valuable to others as well, so I’m going to try to integrate it into Ogre.  Should also prove a useful exercise in using Ogre as well.

Ok, perhaps its unfair to say that the utility sucks.  It is the only peice of software available that can migrate your photos from gallery to flickr and it just doesnt do it very well.  I dont know how many people use it, but it took me 2 hours of messing with this utility so I could do about 2 hours of work to migrate my pictures.  Time I COULD have been using to take NEW pictures.

So, if I get a chance I think I will update the script and add a little much needed documentation.  Maybe even add a little front end for the sad little thing.  I mean, it works, but so does a one legged panda on a unicycle.  Its just sad to watch it go.

I’m an avid fan of version control system such as subversion and cvs; the ability to have every change you make to your files automatically backed up is… addictive.

Most developers keep their source code and resources in a repository of some sort, but I hypothosized that this mechanism would work equally well with any other type of data. I figured that if it keeps my code safe, why can’t it keep all my other documents safe too? Instead of making weekly/monthly backups, I just automatically backup everytime something is changed. In addition this repository would allow me to easily access the most recent version of each of my documents from anywhere.

I decided to try it out for a couple months to see how it worked. I merged my documents from all 3 of the computers that I regularly work on into one repository. This was simple enough. Before I started working each day, I would just pull an update from the repo, and each time I updated a file or added a new resource I made a commit and kept on working. Some added benefits from this repo is that there is now never any fear of deleting files or making large changes.

The only downside to this system is its lack of integration. Perhaps with some customization of tortoiseSVN and some extra scripts I could further simplify the process. Whatever the necessary steps are though, I have decided this is a worthwhile investment. As far as I know there is no commercial product that provides this functionality. It would be appealling to see a product that allows you to manage your documents on an individual basis all across your system; integrated seemlessly into the desktop.

I urge anyone thats experienced with VCSs to try this and see how it works for them.