Cloudy - by nPawn on 2012-04-05 07:41:13
I don't know why but i'm really enjoying all this cloud stuff coming out for developers, along with all the engines that can connect and run stuff out in the cloud easily. We have Amazon Web Services, which is a nice and solid platform to develop for, probably the most mature and stable of what's out there. Following closely after is the Google App Engine along with all it's plugins and tools. I haven't worked with the GAE much especially their Cloud database features (it's closed beta sign up only so far) but I think that'll turn out nicely too. And then you have great tools like Restlet that let's you bring everything together to communicate (and they're coming out with their own GAE type of service soon too APISpark). And there's also Microsoft's Azure, which I haven't had a single look at, but hear it's great for plugging straight in to Visual Studio projects quick and easily. Kind of strange to think of your programming and data no longer residing on your own computer, but rather out there, free as a bird, as long as you have the right authentication ;). So what does everyone like as far as database and app engine out of these (or others)?
Android Sound Programming - by nPawn on 2012-02-23 09:11:22
Thought i'd post this for those out there doing some sound programming on Android phones. Ran into a really annoying bug/limitation while trying to get sounds working. To get sounds and music playing in your apps you have two options, a rather simple MediaPlayer class and slightly more complicated SoundPool class. Being a previous sound programmer I of course opt for more control and go with creating my own sound manager using SoundPool. It all worked great playing little sounds and such until I inserted a song to play. The song wouldn't play at all or would only play for 5 seconds or so then suddenly cut out. It seems there's a 1MB limit when working with sounds in the SoundPool, go over that limit and weird things happen. Of course this is completely undocumented (Android docs are good for very basic knowledge of getting set up, but anything beyond that and you're on your own). 1MB is pretty limiting when it comes to music, I had a small theme song I was trying to play in the background of my app, it was around 800kb as an MP3, but uncompressed it comes out at around 6MB. After several days of pulling my hair out I finally ran across someone that had actually dug into the android code and found this 1MB limit in SoundPool. MediaPlayer on the other hand happily takes large sound files and plays them just fine. So, lesson learned, use SoundPool for more control and small sound effects in your app, and if you need to play background music or larger sound files you may have to go with MediaPlayer. Hopefully this will save somebody out there some headache as they work with sound on Android.
Some errors you might see in LogCat when running into this problem:
AudioFlinger could not create track, status: -12
Error creating audio track
Something about buffer underuns
Comments
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.
