Hi all, I’m back and I’ve got a shiny new game to announce. Astro Bacon is a side-scrolling space shooter for windows phone 7 which I have been working on since the end of Summer. The game is now available from the marketplace at: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=33b0ffdb-1c79-4732-879c-0ff1a5223191 for €0.99. Or if you don’t mind an annoying ad banner in your way you can get it free here: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=f761a51e-6083-4d61-a458-7a3ce93c4e0c (The ad really does limit screen space though).

Story:

In a bid to feed the world’s ever increasing appetite for pork, some science boffins decided to breed genetically modified pigs in space. Unfortunately, the pigs figured out how to use weapons and escaped. They are now taking direct orders from the “Mother Sow” who is hell bent on destroying earth. Now, it’s up to you to defend the earth against the space pig menace. Pilot a nearby satellite and use its grabber to hurl asteroids at space pigs in this side scrolling action game.

Video:  Astro Bacon

Game Features:

• Multiple space pig and asteroid types.
• Upgradable grabbers and armour.
• OpenXLive (Achievements and High Score tables).
• Particle effects.
• Simple and open control system.
• 25 levels and 3 difficulty settings.
• English, German, French and Spanish language support.

Credits:

Design, programming and artwork – Keith Cully.

Localization – Helen Malone.

Sound Effects – Public Domain. (Editing by Keith Cully).

Music – Dan-O. (Free Royalty Free Music by DanoSongs.com).

At the start of this Summer I attended the Dublin Web Summit with Ciarán and Carl. It was there that I met the startup company FluidUI, made up of Dave Kearney  and Ian Hannigan. Luckily for me, they were looking for someone to take some work to speed up the development of their product. I took up their offer and got a summer internship out of it.

What have we been up to?

GameOn Conference 2011

Myself and Carl attended the GameOn Conference in NUIG on the 22nd of August. Although the conference was quite small, the quality of the papers submitted and presented was very good, with some interesting papers on AI in gaming and concurrency. The paper on concurrent scripting was submitted by one of our lectures Joseph Kehoe . Joe is currently undertaking doctoral research into concurrent programming language design, with particular relevance to games development under Professor Joseph Morris of DCU. Overall, it was well worth taking the day off work and the drive to Galway, and I’d like to thank Philippe Geril the event coordinator for having us.

Coder Dojo

A few Saturdays back myself and Carl went up to the first Dublin Coder Dojo to lend a hand and give a quick talk and Q&A on game development. It was really great to see so many young kids there, and even more so to see parents making the effort to bring their kids, some of whom had traveled across the country to attend. Though I suppose its a sign of the times, the parents of the young generation now see that technology is the growing economy not only here in Ireland, but around the world. Software development and general technology related jobs are popping up all over the county every day so it only makes sense. It’s great to see initiatives like Coder Dojo happening!

Ericsson

Myself and Carl finished at Ericsson 2 weeks ago, and now the Flax Project HQ is back in Carlow, since college started back yesterday. It was a great experience to work in the largest software house in Ireland, we gained some great insight into corporate software development and R&D. We’re glad to get back to game development focused work and college in general, though.

iPhone App

So, for those of you who follow myself and Carl on Twitter you will have probably pieced together by now that we’re working on an iPhone app, for a commercial social media company based in Dublin. Right now this iPhone app is consuming most of our time, and has priority over all other projects because this one helps pay the bills.

Portfolio

For those of you who follow the blog regularly will know that both myself and Carl are actively searching for 6 month internships in the games industry this year, starting from around March 2012. (So any spare minute I get I have been working on my game development portfolio website which you can check at ciaranmccann.me)

Where is Flax Engine 0.3?

Flax 0.3 is currently  been shelved for the moment, due to busy schedules and massive work load from other projects/events that we are involved in and now college work.  So unfortunately 0.3 won’t see the light of day this year.

So that’s it for another “Catch up with the Flax Project,” as always do please follow us on Twitter @FlaxProject to keep track of what we are working on. We’d love to hear from you too, so drop us a line!

When using this method all your XML files are converted into .xnb format and compiled into the project. This allows for more efficient loading and hides the data from tampering. If you have a lot of data that does not need to be altered by the application this is a very efficient way of loading it. For my last game I used this method to load all the level layouts and the hints which would appear between levels. For my new game I am using it to define particle effects. This cuts down on the use of polymorphism which leads to further efficiency.

Anyway, for this to work, all the properties of the class which you are loading to must be public and must all be given default values. They must also have the same names as the elements in the XML file. I’m fairly certain there is a way of using shorter element names in the XML file by putting something like [XmlElement(ElementName="name")] above the class property you want specified by the element “name”. This would be useful in shrinking large file sizes.

The process of using the content pipeline for loading XML files in a Windows Phone 7 project may seem complicated at first but it is not once you have done it. It requires the addition of two new projects to your solution. One Windows project for the Content Pipeline to read from and one WP7 project for your application to read from. These will actually be copies of each other and will share the same files.

The process of setting up your custom content is as follows:

Step 1: Add a  project to your solution:

Step 1

Right click on your solution in solution explorer and select Add->New Project…

Step 2: Create a Windows Game Library project:

Step 2

Select Windows Game Library from the list. Name it “CustomContent(Windows)” or something useful like that. Replace the automatically generated “Class1.cs” class with your class or change the namespace to match the rest of your solution and use it.

Step 3: Create a copy of the Windows project for the phone.

Step 3

Right-click on the Windows Library project you have just created and select “Create Copy of Project for Windows Phone”. Change the name of the project created to something useful like “CustomContent(WP7)”. If you try to open a class contained within both of these projects from each project you will notice it is a shared file. This is what you want. I would advise working on any shared classes from within the WP7 project as I have encountered issues of this project not building when making changes from the Windows project.

Step 4: Adding the necessary references to these projects:

Step 4

In the Solution Explorer, right-click on the references folder within your main project and select “Add reference…”. From here select the “Projects” tab and select the WP7 project you added earlier.

Then right-click on the references folder within your main content project and select “Add reference…”. From here select the “Projects” tab and select the Windows project you added earlier.

Step 5: Add any custom content:

To add XML files to your solution, right-click on your main Content project and select “Add->New Item…”. Then select XML file and give it the name you want. You can add your custom classes which you wish to be able to load to into either of the projects you added earlier (They are shared). I have included an image of a matching class and XML file with the standard formatting and an XML file defined for array specification. (Desteroids is the namespace).

Class and XML layout

To specify array content you just add [] brackets at the end of the type and present each array entry between <Item></Item> tags:

XML array layout

The content is then used like any other Content Pipeline entity. To use the content importer in a class you must add the following using statement:

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content;

The code to load a ParticleEffectSettings (as shown above) object is:

ParticleEffectSettings thrusterfireSettings = contentMgr.Load<ParticleEffectSettings>("XML file path-name here");

The code to fill an array of ParticleEffectSettings (as shown above) objects is:

ParticleEffectSettings thrusterfireSettings[] = contentMgr.Load<ParticleEffectSettings[]>("XML file path-name here");

For anyone interested in more reading, here are a couple of useful links on the topic:

A guide to creating a 3D particle system for XBOX 360 using XML. Same process as above but not as beginner friendly and shows how to load non-standard data types into your class.

A really good introduction to XML. This is a very good description of the hows and whys of XML. It is not specific to XNA but is relevant to anyone using XML. It is very long though.

I hope you found this helpful.

Thanks for reading.

Hackerspaces & the Formal Education System

The main focus of the talks for me was a panel discussion about the topic of hackerspaces and how we could somehow integrate them into formal education, and a general discussion of how we could change the system to involve proper computing subjects in the secondary and even primary eduction here in Ireland. This talk was of great interest to me personally, I am extremely passionate about encouraging more young people into the world of technology and programming here in Ireland. The discussion was chaired by Bill Liao and the panellists consisted of James Whelton (Founder & CEO @DisruptiveDev) Mark Deegan (DIT Lecturer), John Looney (Google), Mark Cunningham (DIT student), Martin Mitchell (in gainful employment).

Programming Subject in schools

There is a massive hole in Ireland’s eduction of IT and more specifically programming. It simply doesn’t exist. The best you get is how to do a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. There is no creativity and fun involved in that and it puts negative connotations on the subject as being boring, which is far from the truth. For me, as a games developer, I love the fact that I can write code and then see it come alive in front of me and I’m quite sure many young people would love to be able to create their own games, as so many young people play games everyday.
 
I believe if an engaging, practical, and fun programming subject was introduced into schools it would have a massive positive effect. It would not only be a great subject for giving young people a taste of programming/IT but also help bind usefulness and meaning to subjects like maths, physics and even others. For me I struggled with maths for many years in secondary school and when it came to the leaving cert I had to put in enormous amounts of effort to achieve my minimum grade for the game development course I currently study on. My point is that I was never good at maths and didn’t really see the point in getting the derivative of an equation or finding X.
 

 
Though when I came to college, maths was thought as a problem solving tool, rather than “you’re doing this because it’ll be on the leaving cert, doesn’t matter why.” This approach, coupled with programming algorithms to solve problems, is amazing. Now I really enjoy maths and the ability to think logically to solve a problem, I have even entered logic solving programming competitions. Simply the approach to teaching something makes all the difference.
 
There needs to be reform of our approach to teaching in this country and critically in subjects that will help drive what’s known as the knowledge economy. Every week there are new jobs created in software and technology. We must support this growing sector with a strong educational backbone and not just from third-level on. It needs to start young, use a computer a basic skill nowadays, like a form of literacy. Bill Liao at the talk even went on to say that he believes programming is a basic form literacy and I would agree in this day and age it is no longer a minority group of people involved in computers, they surround and encompass our everyday lives.
 
This discussion is one I am quite passionate about and when I ordinarily wrote this post it stretched quite a few pages. So I will conclude here for now, though I hope to continue to address these pressing issues about science related eduction here in Ireland and how we can change the system.

Coder Dojo

This is a great initiative set up by James Whelton and Bill Liao, which is essentially a hackerspace for young people to get involved and learn about things like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and various other technologies. Their first event was in Cork on Saturday 23rd of July, and will continue every Saturday, so check out the website for more information about how to get involved as a mentor and the like. James and Bill are hoping to get Coder Dojos up and running in Dublin and Galway soon.

Myself and Carl will hopefully be getting involved with the Coder Dojo project, and we also have plans of our own to get involved in running game development workshops in schools around Ireland, but more on that later this year. We will also be involved with the Dublin SkillShare project, set up by Beth Kocher where we will be doing a beginner’s introduction course to game development with HTML5 sometime in October, more details on that later in the year.

Ok, well, that was meant to be a quick post, though I’m quite passionate about the topic of education and programming, so I do tend to rant. Anyway, watch this space for more information on the initiatives I spoke about in the post, and as always do follow us on twitter, facebook, etc. Thanks

Unfortunately for version 0.2 we haven’t got as many features in as hoped, as these days we are exhausted from our daily work at Ericsson and the administration of the site and meetings etc, but nevertheless. We have got some nice little visual features and quite a large amount of under the hood changes. Check out the changelog below to see the main things that changed.

Let’s see the demo

Here is a link to the live demo of the Flax HTML5 Game Engine 0.2 Live Demo, running its editor Weave. Still currently no actual game, though we want to make it easy to make games, so first we must build the tools. If you didn’t see Carl’s last post about Flax HTML5 Game Engine 0.1 Live Demo you should check it out.

Performance

Many people who don’t have hardware acceleration yet complained that for version 0.1 CPU was at 100%. We have tried to reduce that this iteration and in some case we have seen a cut by 40%, but not in all browser/operating systems. We have tested the performance on many systems, both hardware accelerated and non-accelerated, with many different browsers, on various operating systems. The performance is somewhat spotty. For example on Windows in Chrome with hardware acceleration CPU is 19% and GPU 17%. Whereas on Carl’s MacBook Pro we are getting 80% CPU and small drops in frames on a system that is meant to be accelerated. On my Linux machine, with no hardware acceleration, in Chrome we see a drop of 40% CPU from version 0.1. Though there are many large optimisations in the pipeline which we will hopefully see come to life in version 0.3 which I believe could knock off another 20% CPU for non-hardware accelerated systems.

Video

Iterations

• Live demo of version 0.2
• Live demo of version 0.1

Change Log

• Controllable animated sprites with smooth camera panning
• Tile region
• Support for extremely large map size
• Rendering optimisations, though more to follow.
• Up to 40% CPU reduction on some systems.
• Increased responsiveness when tiling in the editor
• Local Storage support, to save maps.
• Auto save local storage
• Map file compression (we tested, it brought a map from 1.6MB to 45KB)
• Internet Explorer 9 support
• Overlay FPS counter
• UI bugfixes
• Main menu items taking focus fixed
• Export text clears
• Editor doesn’t show up by default on mobile devices and resolutions smaller than 1024*768

Next Iteration Goals

So what’s in store for version 0.3 which again will be based around a 3 week time-boxed iteration. Well hopefully we will get to see a few of the following features in 0.3

• Some cool Box2D Physics
• Audio
• More optimisation in CPU usage
• Focus on proper mobile device support

 
Last minute bug time!