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.
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Just another progress update…
Just a quick update from my last post.
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.
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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!