Live Stream Google I/O

I went searching for a live stream of Google I/O this year and I found that Google was offering a gadget to host the live stream on blogs and such. Maybe they do this every year, but I figured I'd try it out. This is one of those things that's definitely more for me than for anyone else.

Tile Engine Source

About a month ago, I decided I wanted to create a simple FarmSim game akin to Harvest Moon. This would require a bunch of sprites, and I figured having a Tile Engine would be the best way to go about implementing it. I know that Microsoft's XNA will be losing support, but I was pretty familiar with it already, so I decided to kick off my making a tile engine using XNA 4.0. But first, as is my wont, I decided to first try and find a good Tile Engine to base my project off of so I could build it up from there.

Now, I consider myself pretty skilled at finding things online. So imagine my surprise when I couldn't find a single decent implementation of a Tile Engine in XNA. There were plenty of tutorials and lots of people pointed to Nick Gravelyn's excellent video tutorial on building your own tile engine. I can understand that they perhaps wanted to have young programmers learn how to do this themselves, and that's fine. But I think it would have been more efficient for me to have the source code, since I already understood the concepts.

So what really got the ball rolling in starting this blog was the idea that I would provide the end result of those tutorials here, as soon as I finished implementing them. And that's exactly what this post is for.

The end result of going through those tutorials includes:

• Tile Engine
• Map Editor
• Base classes for Characters, Items, and Scripts
• Content Importers and Processors for the Map Editor

That said, if anyone has any questions about any of the stuff that's in here, I highly recommend that you go and watch the video tutorials before asking any questions.

TileEngineSource.zip - Download

Hello World!

I'm willing to bet that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of personal programming blogs that have "Hello World!" as the first post. But it is fitting, so I'll just leave it there.

I'm starting this blog mostly as a sort of personal reference - a place where I can put down my thoughts and, most importantly, solutions to problems that I encounter in my adventures in development. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but haven't had anything significant to post. This is mostly intended for me, but if there are others out there who find my solutions helpful, then I'm glad to help out my fellow devs.

Now for some testing of code blocks.

// Comment
public class Testing {
   public Testing() {
   }
 
   public void Method() {
     /* Another Comment
     on multiple lines */
     int x = 9;
   }
}