Finished up The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Mini Review - by nPawn on 2012-01-07 11:03:05
Fun single player RPG game. I hadn't played Oblivion (aka Elder Scrolls IV), so I was a bit lost on some of the storylines floating around, but it didn't affect game play, and there seems to have been plenty of fresh content so I wasn't too alienated. The graphics were quite nice, I don't have a power house machine, but it's not a slouch either (i5 quad core, nVidia GT 240 1GB vid) and I found myself stopping and enjoying the view in the game more than once, which is a rare thing for me to do.
Content of the game was overflowing. More quests than you would ever want to do, although I can't say there was a big variety in the type of quests. Most quests involved some disgruntled person wanting back an item or piece of equipment they had lost which somehow invariably ends up at the end of a dungeon, please go retrieve it. There were much more involved and intricate quests than this in the main story of course, but if you stuck to side quests it does get a tad monotonous. Another thing I found strangely lacking in variety was the monsters. Dungeons were usually filled with regular npc types, zombies, or spiders/rats, nothing to write home about. Maybe they spent too much time working on the dizzying amount of quests.
One of the funner things about the game was Dragons. They seem to show up randomly at times while you're trekking across the land, you'll get an uneasy feeling and realize there's a shadow circling over you. Quick scan of the sky shows that indeed there's a dragon scoping you high in the sky, ready to make a meal out of you. It's often best at this point to send your horse into a full gallup and head to the nearest group of people you can find, doesn't matter if they're good guys or bad, dragons attack indiscriminately and mayhem usually breaks out. There's lots of fun little touches like this to the game that make it stand out above the pack.
If you find yourself with a bit of free time, you may want to pick up this game since it is very nice about letting you decide if you want it to be a one day of playing game, or something that lasts weeks. If you focus on the main quest you could literally be done in a day of play, if you tend to get lost on side quests and exploring you could stretch it out for a lot of play.
XNA 4.0 Game Studio Beta now available - by nPawn on 2010-07-17 12:22:00
I'm not sure how this is different from the earlier 4.0 beta that was available earlier, but it looks like they've released a new version of it for July. You can find the XNA 4.0 Game Studio Beta here.
XNA 4.0 tutorials - by nPawn on 2010-04-29 12:48:06
Jeromy Walsh is starting up a series of tutorials for XNA 4.0, which is handy because the current documentation is fairly sparse right now. These tutorials are styled after the old NEHE tutorials and are a good starting point for the many changes to be found in 4.0. Note that the current download for Game Studio 4.0 says it's for Windows phone development only, well, it's not, the 4.0 CTP download has everything you need to create games for Windows, XBox, and now phones too. You can find Jeromy's tutorials here.
Gaffer updates his game networking site - by nPawn on 2010-02-20 04:30:25
Glenn Fiedler (aka Gaffer) appears to be reworking his site that deals with network programming and game physics. He's one of the better network programmers out there that has been helping people understand network coding for several years now. I think he's speaking at GDC this year too. Anyways you can find his website here.
Adobe Flex vs Microsoft Silverlight - by nPawn on 2009-03-30 07:49:44
For developing rich internet applications you have two big choices these days - Adobe's Flex (MXML) with Actionscript and Microsoft's Silverlight (XAML) with C#. Here's my thoughts after using both Flex 3.0 and Silverlight 3.0 Beta (which is rapidly approaching release).
Scripting Languages: With Silverlight you have access to the well tested C# language (you can also use Basic, C++, and other languages that may suit you better). C# brings with it a host of powerful and varied libraries that have been developed over the years. Flex comes with Actionscript, which isn't as well tested and doesn't have the large base of libraries to play with yet, but it's code base is definitely catching up. I've found Actionscript to be very stable, despite being a relatively new language. Actionscript and C# are very comparable as far as ease of programming, they seem to be a friendly mix between Java and C/C++ with the ease of PHP. Actionscript is not strongly typecast, meaning you can get away with mixing variables a bit easier - handling incoming data whether it's xml, JSON, text, or other is very easy. C# is much more rigid, if you need to switch your data formats around a lot you're in for a lot of extra work using data stream converters and setting up precisely made Classes to fit the incoming data. I think overall Silverlight and C# is better, as it seems like it has the most extensible and robust language to use, plus you'd be able to tweak data and have more control over it than you would in Actionscript.
Development Environment: Silverlight seems to come with a hodge podge of development environments and plugin packages right now (all of which you have to download seperately and make sure you have, or things won't work all the way). You have Visual Web Developer (VWD) which is your typical Visual Studio environment, it's great for coding, but poor when it comes to working with visual elements. You also have a program called Blend which looks like it wants to be Photoshop. Blend is great working with visual elements but not so great working with actual code (It has no debug or ability to run programs currently). I found myself switching between VWD and Blend a lot as I moved between forms, and then actual coding, it got to be cumbersome after a while. Adobe decided to base their development environment on top of an existing Java editor called Eclipse, this Eclipse hybrid is known as the Flex Builder. Flex Builder shines where VWD and Blend stumbles. Hopping between visual design work and coding is a snap in Flex Builder. You can add visual elements and toy with them (change their color, shape, size, etc) quickly and easily, a single click takes you to the code of the control you were just working on. Flex Builder also inherited a lot of cool coding features since Eclipse has been around for a long while and been tweaked by every day coders, like pressing ctrl over a function name anywhere in code will immediately take you to the file and line the function is defined at. Flex Builder and Blend both seem a tad resource heavy, things don't happen quite immediately as you click around in them. VWD was very responsive compared to them. Both VWD and Flex Builder have the standard code completion and other tool tips to help you quickly fill out code. But when it comes down to it Flex Builder is just a lot easier to use, design, and code with. I'm scratching my head wondering why Microsoft didn't combine Blend and VWD into a single program (maybe that's planned for the future?). For now the Silverlight environment is obviously not mature enough at this time, especially for an impending 3.0 release. VWD is a solid platform for pure code work, but they haven't yet figured out how to gracefully do the visual elements like Flex Builder has.
Ease of Design: Designing in MXML (Flex) is very intuitive, you have a variety of layout containers (panels, horizontal boxes, vertical boxes, forms, etc) that flow and build upon each other naturally, it's easy to tell what's going to happen as you place things in these containers. XAML design is awkward, you are given obscure container classes that don't tell you much about them, like StackPanel and DockPanel. One of the mainly used visual layout elements of XAML is the Grid, which seems like the uncomfortable cousin of old HTML tables. They don't flow well and you have to do most the design work in code. In Flex Builder you can set up and adjust containers like this with a few simple clicks of the mouse. Actual controls inside these layout containers are pretty similar between Silverlight and Flex - you have your buttons, datagrids, charts, checkboxes, etc. and both work well for setting up events like clicks. Another positive for Flex i've found is that it let's you use percentages when settings widths and heights for layout items and controls, whereas Silverlight has an odd pseudo percentage system that isn't even defined on the control itself. Doesn't seem like a big deal off hand, but when you're trying to make a dynamically sized web page, having a flexible sizing system gets important quick.
For now i'm declaring Adobe Flex the winner between the two. Despite not being around as long as the Visual Studio series, for the most part it's just as stable and robust. The Flex community is thriving and there are an impressive amount of easy web tutorials out there. The latest greatest version of Silverlight left me feeling they were still trying to figure out how to mimick Flex. Silverlight will catch up in a year or two, but for now I think it's still having an identity crisis deciding if it should be coding or designing, where Flex is already doing both.
Silverlight Blend
