Threw a texture over the sun tonight, it came up looking so good that I don’t think I want to spoil it with the stupid face on it any more… on second thoughts I’d better give it a go!

I’ve spend most of this last week mucking around in Expression Blend (Microsoft’s Layout tool for their new UI API WPF).

The screens above show the fruit of my labor, it’s a non-interactive screen which displays products that have to be hand tipped into the batches of product we make here at the feedmill.

The old one (to the right) was a simple rich text control which read in the contents of a text file generated by the process control system, it coloured everything from the bottom to the first “%” character in the text in blue to signify the active batch.

The new version reads in a new XML formatted text file (watched by a “FileWatcher” object)  into a typed dataset, manipulates the data a little to weed out anomalies and to regulate the timing, then generates an “ObservableCollection” of objects from the resulting dataset which gets bound to the WPF window.

So it’s a bit of a weird blend of the newest of the new and the crappiest of the old, text file integration is a bloody nightmare… you should see the hoops I have to jump through in the code to smooth out the missing bits.

After my first week of WPF I think it has a lot of potential but I don’t think the first version of the tools are quite ready for prime time.

Seeing I failed to find a decent picture of a Grogan last night I’ve changed the gameplay element to a sun, the idea being that the sun is an indistructable ball that bounces around each level, you get 10 points every time you punch the ball, but if you touch it while you’re not punching you get hurt.

I also figure I can use the light source to show off the 3D nature of the levels and objects.

Obviously there’s no texture on it yet, it’s either going to be a glowing mass inside a metal frame or a dodgie face inside, ala The Mighty Boosh.

Surfing around the “Great Game Experiment” tonight (wasting time because I can’t be assed doing anything else) I stumble across this intriguing little puzzle game.

If you thought the screen shot look like a block of wood wrapped in string, you’d be right, the goal of the game is to wrap a block of wood with string. The string stains the wood where it touches, the goal is to cover 100% of the object.

For it’s simplicity the rendering techniques and the physical modeling of the string are pretty damn good, it’s got a super realistic crisp feel.

The music is pretty good also, the little bird to the bottom left bops along with you.

I’d love to see it hooked up to Moorey’s cad asteroid!

Got stuck into visual things tonight, I’ve been struggling to come up with a visual style for “Ride the Fury” for the past few weeks, today I came the realisation that I don’t need a bloody visual style!

It’s not like it’s a commercial venture, more than likely it’ll be me forcing Zetty to play test it with me and a few drunken rounds with friends. So I’m just going to do whatever comes to me at the time, be it photoshop, 3DS MAX, cartoon, super hero, photo reference… they’re all going into the mix.

I’m pretty happy with the old dude on the title screen, I was trying to talk Zett (my wife) into letting me use a photo of her with one of her “Henry Rollins’esc” intense death stares. But she wouldn’t be in it.

 Zett headed to the movies with the work girls tonight, so I’ve spent the whole night looking at a special effect for Ride the Fury.

This is just a proof of concept but I’m pretty stoked I got it working to this stage, basically I’ve taken the bump map effect they use in modern water rendering and applied it to the UV co-ordinates of my background texture, nothing too special there, the difference with my implementation is that I’m generating the ripple texture in real time.

The idea is to have to back ground ripple and react to the players power moves!

I’ve still got to generate some better source offset textures but it proves that it works.

I’d better go grab some dinner, I’ve been so carried away with this that I’ve forgotten to eat… more updates soon.

This is one I’ve had to use a few times and keep forgetting so I’ll stick it here for next time. Stick this into the visibility property on a textbox in Reporting Services to show/hide in when there is a value in the vairable you are displaying.

=not Fields!SharePercent.Value is System.DBNull.Value

Came across this one today, I’m sure I’ve hit it before but of course I didn’t remember. The worst part of the problem is that the error message is not very descriptive (Unresolved external refrence) but the solution is nice and easy.

------------------
foo.h:
------------------
#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif 

int foo( int ); 

#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif 

------------------
foo.cpp
------------------
#include "foo.h" 

int foo( int i ) { ... } 

------------------
main.c
------------------
#include "foo.h" 

int main() { foo(1); }

 Welcome all, I’ve setup this blog to separate the code and XNA articles from my regular  blog.

The hope is to focus the two blogs more, freeing me up to go as silly as I want on my regular blog and as nerdy and techy as I want in the other.

Should be a win for everyone… first up I’m going to copy over the few good tips from the old BrownBot code lib, enjoy!