So, it’s been 2 weeks since Dare to be Digital started and I’ve failed to write anything about it so far, so here’s an update.
Progress
The first two weeks of the competition have gone fairly smoothly. We’ve had problems with exporting models and animations and with collision responses, but no major issues that we haven’t worked past. So far we have the abilities for each of our bee types in place and working in our blocked out level. We’ve designed and redesigned the obstacles involved in the game and we’re happy with the basic progression of these so far, but obviously we’ll continue to change and refine them until we have a complete demo.
XNA, C# and Visual Studio
XNA is working very well for us, and we’re making far more progress than we expected. Compared to the OGRE engine which we worked with on our last project XNA has a lot of similarities – it’s very flexible and allows the developer to decide the extent to which they rely on built in functionality. However, XNA does have an advantage in terms of the amount of features available without relying on third party libraries and although content loading hasn’t been entirely painless, the design of XNA’s content pipeline is really nice.
We’re using our own systems for basic physics and collision detection, so the only external functionality we’re making use of is XNAnimation for skeletal animation and EasyConfig for config file loading. Both of these integrated incredibly easily with XNA and are working very well for us. While early on we did consider using IronPython for scripting support, simply loading values from config files is providing more than enough flexibility for us so far, and the format we’re working with has far less overhead than creating XML files.
Although none of the team had much C# experience before the start of Dare, it didn’t take long to get used to it. Obviously we don’t yet have the same level of understanding of the language as we did with C++, but for most functionality the two are similar enough that it isn’t an issue. The fact that Visual Studio 2008 practically writes the code for us is also helpful here…
Websites and all that
We’ve got some concept art and renders up on our page on the Dare website, where you can also check out the games other teams are working on. We also have a twitter feed, though mostly we just share pictures of bees.