Project Maternity was a 2010 Imagine Cup entry from Ninja Vikings with Claws’ (Dominic Bodman, Catarina Barros, and myself). It made it to the second round of the competition — not bad for first year students that had only a few weeks in which to develop it from scratch.
Alien Swarm Holdout Mode
A big part of the Alien Swarm mod I’m working on is spawning aliens so that they attack in massive waves, rather than in response to triggers set off by the player. Luckily for me, the game’s SDK already includes a lot of this functionality in its incomplete Holdout mode (operated by the “asw_holdout_mode” entity).
Viewing Alien Swarm Models
Alien Swarm assets including models are all packaged into VPK (“Valve Pak”) files and cannot be accessed manually unless they are extracted with a tool such as Gibbed’s VPK Extractor.
Packaged models should be viewable with the Model Viewer but Alien Swarm‘s aren’t. That’s because the Model Viewer requires a proper folder/directory structure even if said folders don’t actually contain any models. Otherwise you’ll get a bunch errors.
Alien Swarm Mod: Dev Diary
Ninja Vikings with Claws (an indie game developer founded by myself and other students on my course) has started work on a modification of Valve’s freely available co-operative shooter Alien Swarm, and I’ve decided to document the development process.
Develop 2010 Expo Highlights
This year’s Develop conference in Brighton took place last month (July 14-15, 2010) and, while access to the conference itself carried a pretty hefty price tag, the expo that ran alongside it was free for anyone to attend. Headline-grabbing keynotes from the likes of Peter Molyneux and Tim Shafer were off limits to Expo-goers but a selection of smaller, 30 minute mini-sessions were open to everyone.
Harmonia
Harmonia was designed to be an asynchronous co-operative game for the Xbox 360 in which an experienced videogame player could support a less experienced player who was at the center of the gameplay experience.
Pseudo 2D Convex Hull Generation
While working with the separating axis theorem in a 2D XNA project, I started looking at ways to generate a tight-fitting convex hull around a sprite in order to implement more accurate collision detection than I would be able to with a standard bounding box.
Drawing 2D Primitives with XNA
As described on MSDN, drawing lines and other 3D Primitives with XNA involves defining vertices in world space, setting up an Effect, applying view and projection transformations, and finally making a call to the graphics card with a DrawUserPrimitives (or similar) call.
BioShock comes to Brighton Beach
To promote BioShock 2, 2K Games recently circulated a letter purportedly written by one Mark Meltzer – a potential new in-game character who is in search of his lost daughter – requesting that people travel to one of ten listed beaches at dawn on Saturday, August 8th (today). Locations included Bondi Beach in Australia, Jones Beach in New York, various European beaches, and good ol’ Brighton Beach here in England.
Using Blender Models In XNA
The following is based on Part I of Stromcode’s excellent Modelling for XNA with Blender series, which details how to create a basic UV textured 3D model in Blender and export it as an .fbx file for use in XNA.