Another little clip.

Well I haven't got around to writing anything about the design or coding of my little tank game exercise yet but, just to keep something happening on this page, here is another clip of the current state of the game.

The enemy tanks have been given a rudimentary AI structure, breaking their control into sensor, driver and gunner components.  Currently the enemy tanks still exhibit simple patrolling behaviour, but do so agressively now.  They can now fire back!  Just to make it a little more visually interesting, they continuously fire at nothing if the player is out of sensor range.

A musical interlude.

Just for the hell of it, I thought I would paste in a link to my most recent sizable composition.This one was written for a family gathering celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary.

A simple 3D Tank Game

So to get the ball rolling on this whole XNA game blog thingy, I shall stick a link here to a video which pretty much shows the state of the game as it currently stands.

My intention is to retrospectively blog about a lot of the process of getting to this stage, then carry on blogging as I extend the game further.

The game is loosely based on the old Stellar 7 game idea of tank battles in a simple space setting. I was inspired by a conversation I had about sitting in front of the old Apple ][ playing hours of Stellar 7, and listening to lots of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene album. I thought it would be a nice little project to get back into some game programing, and try out some simple AI ideas.

Anyway, here's a video showing the current state of the game:

Time to try again

OK, so I thought I would try this whole blogging thing again and see how it goes. My current intention (following a suggestion by David Taylor) is to try to blog about the process of creating a simple 3D game using XNA as middleware for directX development on windows.

Perhaps this will, as previously, be my last post for another couple of years — but hopefully not.

Con Week 1 (removed)

Removed:

Since the blogging about the con course never really took off, mainly because the course was a bit of a disappointment, I have removed this post by way if historical revisionism.

Conservatorium Course

I finally got off my fat arse and signed up for a course at the Sydney Con. I have for some time been thinking about doing some sort of study to do with composition. Something to help motivate and direct me was what I had in mind.

I have decided I will try to blog about the course, including all the pieces of music and musical exercises that I produce. We have already had six of the eight weeks of class, so this will be mostly done as a retrospective.

Audio Testing.

I would like to be able to embed sound files from Soundclick.com directly into this blog. Below I have tried to create a link to one of the tracks I have uploaded to soundclick.com.

A Tune For Mum

I modified the html generated by the soundclick script to remove some of the extra crap around the player. It is much more streamlined and visually appealing now.

Well, I ended up having to modify the page template to widen the main text column. I couldn't work out a way of forcing the soundclick widget to a width other than 470 pixels, which was too wide for the default template. Bit of a shame really, the narrow column for posts did have a certain aesthetic charm.