This is a guide on how to set up Blender and the Collada exporter plug-in. You’ll need to follow this guide in order to be able to use my XNA Blender importer.
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March 19th, 2008 | 01:01 am | XNA with Blender | No Comments |
This is turning out to be a series in itself! Not much of an update here, more a triumphant fist in the air for when things actually work as they should.
Just another progress update…
Just a quick update from my last post.
In part 1, I looked at the Content Pipeline and it’s components. In this article, I will be looking at the files I am going to be importing and the tool I will be using to create them.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on XNA on this blog. In fact, a long time since I posted on anything! After a re-shuffle of projects I have been undertaking in my own personal time, I’ve managed to make far more time to play around with XNA, my real passion.
When I first started playing with XNA, I was intrigued as to how XNA allows developers to get their game assets into XNA. Out-of-the box, XNA allows you to easily include certain graphics formats such as .PNG or .JPEG images and 3D file formats such as .X (DirectX) or .FBX (3D Studio Max). Great if your 3D modelling package exports these formats but not so convenient if it does not. I want to import from Blender but this is not supported directly by XNA….
However, XNA does have one pretty clever trick up its sleeve:
The Content Pipeline
This is the first of a series of programming tutorials focusing on games programming. This first article is going to try to give an overview of what we are going to be using to accomplish this and a little history of the tools themselves. Don’t worry if some of this is confusing, try to pick up what you can and then more forward to the first lesson. Do at least snag the files from the “What will I need?” section to get everything installed though.
Read more…
I’m just working on the code which will form the basis of my upcoming tutorial and it’s a huge learning experience for me. One thing I haven’t really focussed on before was optimisation of .NET code. While I’ve re-factored code because it was doing things in a ’roundabout’ way that could be optimised, I haven’t had to ever worry about real-time performance before. With XNA, a sudden pause or glitch is going to be bad for a game.
One thing that will cause glitches in XNA games is if the garbage collector kicks in at an inappropriate time so a strategy to avoid this needs to be adopted quite early on in development of your game engine.
I’ve been carrying around £40 worth of Waterstone’s vouchers for almost two years now and decided to stop wandering in there on the off-chance I would see something I really liked to use them up. Instead, I waited for something I really wanted and ordered it into the local branch.
Read more…
With the new release of XNA Refresh, you can now easily add fonts to your projects. While it is nice to just specify a true type font in an xml file and have XNA import the resulting bitmap generated from it, I prefer to be able to edit the bitmap in photoshop to make it look better.
Thankfully, someone else has written a nice tool to create the intermediary bitmap for you. All you then need to do is select the white characters in photoshop and start applying effects!