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I’ve been getting in the festive spirit and bought myself a few things for my computerJ, well you didn’t think I was going to spend money on someone else?!?

I had a small windfall recently due to a tax rebate so after I had given crispy a load of cash I spent the remaining pennies on some stuff for me thanks to play.com I now have a new Keyboard & mouse and a spanking new Xbox360 controller (for windoze) that I’ve been after for ages now I finally got one that didn’t cost £35 I like the fact that Micro$oft have started selling these to PC owners for less than they were selling them to Xbox360 ownersJ.

Any who, I see now that the Space game template has keyboard support in it, I only fond out because I was showing crispy that my controller did work. I saw that it was a two player game I poked at a few buttons and hay presto it worked but there isn’t any indication on the screens to let you know that you can press a key sort of thing.

In Bert news, I got colour bleed on the tiles when they are drawn so I don’t think I’ll be using the tiled sprite example for the render engine, if I still get this problem when I write my own render engine I’ll probably look at spacing out the tiles and see if that works.

I’ve also started reading John David Funges “AI for Games and Animation, A cognitive Modeling Approach” but I’m having a little trouble with the Maths in it, Maths has never been my strong suit. Yes I’m aware of the irony, but I wanted to read it for more a grounding in AI techniques than a how to, which is good because that’s what the book is intended to be.

OK so I’m a little late with my report for this week and I don’t have the screen shot I promised, but I can tell you I’m cheating…

Well I don’t see it as cheating really because I had to read and fully understand the code before I thought “bugger it. That’ll save me some time”.

“What are you blithering on about Mr Henry?” – I hear you cry, well, I’ve always had a problem with writing games in that I spend most of my time trying to put the menu and game state system together that I never get round to writing the actual fun stuff of the game and the times that I’ve just jumped straight in and done the game I don’t get round to doing the intro or settings system. This time I’m just going to use the Game State Demo for XNA, not only because I like the simplicity, but also because I’m a lazy S.O.B. Having said that I’m part way through the tiled map sample and I think I might be able to “Tweak” it to meet my needs, I’ve got it showing a random collection of map blocks and I think that with a little more work on the map converter I should be able to use this code for the 2D render system.

Then there’s also the work I’ve done on the sprite sheet compiler it takes the old PCX graphic files and reorders the sprites into my new layout rather than the weirdo way that Paul had them, but I think he had them laid out this way to make life easier in the map editor, and then saves them off in to one big PNG file. I now have two massive PNG files that will be compiled in through the content pipeline.

The sound samples are really straight forward, using XACT so I’m thinking that will be a quick half a day job to integrate.

Still to do is to figure out how I’m going to store and then reference the player keyboard layout but until then I’ll probably just go for the standard WSAD layout used in every FPS.

As soon as I have something to Show I’ll up load it.