XNA Game Programming Adventures
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I was working on Xin a little yesterday and I got the first basic event working. This event is a key press event. It doesn't check to see if a key is down, it checks to see if a key was down in the last frame and up in the current frame, being pressed once. I wired an event handler for the event and was able to exit the game when the Escape key was pressed. That was a rather trivial example but there is a lot of potential there. I have quite a few events planned for Xin as well as other methods and properties.

I am toying around with Xin and I have a few ideas on things that I can add to Xin to make it more useful. There are a few methods that I've come up with that are used frequently in making games. I'm also looking into adding events to Xin that you can subscribe to.

For the next tutorial I'm working on being able to read items at runtime rather than have them hard coded in the game. I decided to make an editor for creating the items. This is probably the easiest way rather than hard coding the file. I would like to know if you would like a tutorial on creating the editor or would you rather just have the source project available for download. You can give your feedback on my forum, XNA GPA Forum.

For now I'm going on the idea that you don't want a tutorial on creating the editor. I will write an optional tutorial on creating the editor at some point but instead just work on the tutorial for reading in items.

Unfortunately the next XNA RPG tutorial will be a little delayed. I had planned on working on the latest tutorial yesterday but wasn't really at the computer yesterday. Had to go out rather early and didn't get back until quite late. I will get to work on the new tutorial tonight though. As I mentioned, the tutorial will be about adding items for the player to pick up and use. I have the base classes ready, it is a matter of integrating them into the game. I will be doing it a little differently than I had originally planned. So, I would suggest continuing to visit my site for the latest news on my tutorials.

You can also follow along on the blog that I added to my site XNA Game Programming Adventures. I will eventually be removing these pages from my site in favor of the new blog. It is mostly because the new blog is much easier to work with than creating these pages.

I started work today on the next tutorial in my XNA RPG tutorial series. In this tutorial I am continuing on with adding items for the player to pick up. If you remember, in the last tutorial I had the player being able to pick up chests with gold in them. In this tutorial I'm adding in the ability for the player to be able to pick up items. To get started with that I had to add some new classes to the game. These classes will represent items that the player can pick up, have in their inventory, equip, buy, and sell. This tutorial won't have much to do with XNA. The reason why is I'm laying the foundation for the next RPG tutorial where I will add the items to the chests. If I'm feeling ambitious and the length of the tutorial isn't too long I might try and add in having items in the chest to this tutorial. I encourage you to continue visiting my site as I have big plans for the site and my tutorials. Don't forget to check out the forum. I know there isn't much at the moment but it has only just started. Give it a chance.

It has beeIt has been a pretty busy month. I did finish my entry into the game programming challenge at Game Institute. It won, but by default because nobody else was able to finish a game on the theme for this challenge. I didn't quite get as much into it as I would have liked. It was a fairly complete game though and I was happy with it. If I had more time and I wasn't as busy as I have been I probably would have.

I have also been working on Xin, my XNA Input Management class. That is coming along quite nicely and I'm putting the finishing touches on the documentation. I hope to have Xin available for download next Monday, if all goes according to plan.

Sorry about this, but I have been quite busy the last little while with work and my entry to the game programming challenge at http://www.gameinstute.com though I haven't spent as much time on that as I would like either. It is almost done, about 90% finished I would say, and there are two weeks left for the challenge. I've gotten a lot of good feedback on what I have done so far. People really like the game I've got.

Should let you know as well, I'm going to be visiting family between now and the 17th of March. Not sure what kind of access to the net I'm going to have, or how much time I will have to work on things. There is a lot that I need to do between today and when I get back while I am gone. I would like to work on a tutorial or two if I can find the time. I've missed writing tutorials over the last month or so.

I also hope to release the source code for Xin in the near future. I was going to release Xin as a game library but instead I believe I will just release the source code for the classes. I've created separate classes for the Xbox 360 and for Windows. My partner has also been working on classes for the Zune and the Zune HD. I don't have either of those but he has been testing them.