[Doing anything with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express?]

I'm a lead programmer at a games company and I'd much rather use AM for my own personal games than anything else. We're stuck with Max at work, but it's the art department who have to use it there, not me. I suffer no such restrictions at home.

 

Can we perhaps convince Chris to open source his plugin. Stick it on sourceforge or something. If he's looking for compensation perhaps we should take a collection.

 

I've done exporters before but I really don't want to have to reinvent the wheel here. I only have so much hobby time and I'd prefer to be writing games with it. However I'd probably chip in with maintenance of an existing code base.

[Doing anything with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express?]

Hiya,

 

I've been away from hash stuff for a while but I do have some experience with the api. I originally wrote an object exporter for the Auran Jet game engine hmmm... about 5 years ago...

 

Anyway, as per the topic, is anyone using microsoft's new offering to create games for xbox 360 and pc?

 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

 

Andrew

[A question or two...]

Hello again FW,

 

AM is perfect for creating assets, (eg the houses etc) which you would then place into the game world using a level editor.

 

The game engines out there are great for displaying assets in a scene, but in order to make it a game rather than just a 3d walkthrough, you have to give all of the meshes context.

 

For example a mesh of a car is exactly the same as a mesh of a tree or a character as far as the engine is concerned. You need some programming in there that tells that asset how to behave. It's not enough to have a character with a walk animation, the object has to know when to walk. And that means programming.

 

There are many talented programmers out there who are looking for projects with driven, imaginitive, artistic people who know how to handle a artwork. Go to the forums of a few 3d engines and let people know that you have a project in mind. Concept art or 3d renders is a great way to sell your game idea to programmers as most of them would love to have really nice 3d assets to make their code come to life.

 

Andrew

[Which engine?]

I used to use Auran Jet but now I'm looking at changing over to Ogre.

 

I have found them to be both excellent engines. However Ogre is free whereas Jet is free for non commercial use. Ogre supplies source code whereas Jet does not.

 

Unfortunately if I want to use animation master I have to write another exporter by the look of things. I wrote one for Jet a few years ago, and I have to say that the API on Hash's side was very nice to use. It was about a week's programming that would have been better spent on my game however.

 

Have you designed a game that you want to implement? In some respects (but much less so these days than in years past) that can dictate your choice of engine. (eg are you targetting pc, mac, linux, web, pda, mobile phones etc, what style do you want to use, do you need good multi-user / networking support)

[Particles]

Games use many techniques these days that used to be confined to 3d rendering programs because the hardware is starting to be able to support it.

 

It will only be a matter of a few years before hardware will have inbuilt support for high level rendering api's like Renderman or a Micro$oft created equivalent. Pixel shader 2.0, HLSL is a primitive version of that now.

 

So yes many things are now possible. With games it's all about cost though. Particles are calculation intensive and the more complex (read more realistic) systems you have, the more your frame rate suffers. And as they say, Frame rate is life. ;-)

 

So to answer your orignal question FW, what you really need is a kick-@$$ programmer to show a render of your AM created kick-@$$ particles to and then say 'Implement this'.

 

But crawling before you can walk, you have to first ask 'What engine, what genre, what premise, and most importantly, why is my game going to be fun?'.

 

So many people talk about creating games, so few finish them, and an amazingly small percentage of those succeed in creating a game that is actually fun. Most people get tied up with the features, "it's got 'a' or 'b'" without stopping to consider whether those features pull their weight when it comes to gameplay.

 

Good luck with your game. :-)