James Wynn

Not that its news, but XNA along with a membership to the XNA Creators Club allows developers to create games in a unified system for both Windows and XBox 360. Although XNA uses C#, which I personally had reservations against, it is actually quite easy to develop on and even fun to use. XNA has now abated these reservations about C# and has persuaded me to try to port my project to the 360.

With sound, networking, a solid widely used gamepad interface, and excellent graphics capabilities the XNA platform seems ideal for small games development. The only reservations still present are against the relative immaturity of the community (as opposed to Ogre’s which is superb) and the lack of distribution mechanisms. The distribution problem is slated to be resolved with a rating system within the developer community, but this just comes back to the other problem.

There is, still, a significant amount of community generated content for learning and using XNA, but I worry about the platform if it does not attract a higher concentration of mature developers. We shall see.

The Feb ‘05 edition of Game Developer Magazine had an article titled “Late-Binding Data” and described an extremely useful mechanism for automatically reloading data into a game engine dynamically when the data has been changed.  It detects when a file has been updated and repopulates the data throughout the system.  So, an image/model can be exported from some other program and the results will be immediately visible in the game. No reloading!

This sounds like a huge time saver in the long run, but right now its turning into a significant time sink.  I figure if this functionality would be useful in my personal project, it would likely be valuable to others as well, so I’m going to try to integrate it into Ogre.  Should also prove a useful exercise in using Ogre as well.

Its been quite some time since the last post here and apparently even my gallery broke while I was away. But that is now fixed and the site is seeing a few changes. Hopefully the title graphic will even see an update and pull it away from the default image.

Its been a never ending onslaught of rushed deadlines and hurried fixes for the last several months, but now things are starting to calm down to a point where side projects can be addressed again. McLarin Adventures, the game that has eaten up so very much of my time, is really starting to play and act like a game. It has come a long ways since I joined the team a little over a year ago. The lag on the UMPC has finally been sufficiently dealt with, and most of the stability bugs have been squashed.

It seems all the hard work has been rewarded as the entire team is going to the Game Developers Conference this year. The game won’t be entered into the IGF this year, but it should be ready for ‘09 at which point there will hopefully be a Serious Games division. In the mean time though, San Fransisco will be a relaxing change and the opportunity to network with more industry people should prove quite entertaining.

Today, Adam Wilmoth of The Oklahoman did an article about me and getting into the game industry entitled “The job isn’t a game … it’s developing them.”

“The way I see it, on all real games, you’re trying to get across some idea,” Wynn said. “(Role Playing Games) try to get across various political struggles, or something philosophical. I think you’re always learning something in a game, even if it’s just combat and layouts.

“We’re just taking it a little bit further where the processes you’re learning in the game aren’t just applicable in the game. You can use them in real life.”

It’s always entertaining to have your opinions syndicated.