Nuclex - The Art of XNA Game Programming

Series

I'm planning to start a short article series:

There are a lot of XNA tutorials out there that explain the basics - how to display a sprite, how to do collision detection and how to render a bunch of colorful particles with additive blending. But there aren't many articles that explain to you how you're supposed to put it all together - how to structure a game so that it is easy to extend and remains manageable when the amount of code begins to grow.

The discipline that deals with this issue is called software architecture. Like programming, or any other creative process, it relies a lot on tacit knowledge - finding a good solution without first running down an alley of dead ends (that you can identify using the Principles of Object-Oriented Design) requires a lot of experience.

What I will do in this series is let you look over my shoulder as I design a small game and try to explain my motivations for choosing one design over another while I do so. This will give you a solid starting point and an understanding of the design process that you can apply to your own game projects.

I just uploaded a new release of the Nuclex Framework on CodePlex!

It has been a lot of work getting the GUI library finalized. For once, I really wanted to have 100% unit test coverage on the whole library, which meant a lot of work ensuring the design allowed for this and thinking of all the test cases. But hey, what other GUI library can provide that level of unit tests! :)

Another feature I didn't want to let go of was control navigation with the game pad and cursor keys. The idea is that you, the developer, just throw some controls on the screen and the GUI will automatically figure out which control to change focus to when the player uses the thumb stick on his game pad. This means you can just add four buttons labeled "New Game", "Options", "Credits" and "Quit" to your screen and voilà, you've got a main menu the user can interact with using his mouse, keyboard or game pad.

Noticed anything different about this website recently?

I just finished a complete overhaul of my website. Because my website design skills are utterly hopeless, this time I just gave in and bought a finished template that I had fancied for some time already.

I just uploaded a new release of my WiX XNA Installer template that has been updated to XNA 3.1!

If you happen to have a customized installer built on the XNA 3.0 template, fear not, for the required changes are very small! Use your favorite Diff/Merge tool and copy over any changes referring to Xna_3_1 into your existing installer.

I have declared this release a beta because I haven't gotten around to testing it on all possible operating systems.

The Nuclex Framework has been released to CodePlex today!

Instead of only writing about all the cool stuff and then pointing people at my Subversion repository whenever someone asks for the source code, I finally sat down and published the entire Nuclex Framework on CodePlex, together with lots of examples, documentation and screen shots.

The Nuclex Framework consists of small isolated building blocks that you can pick from, so you can easily use just the things you require and ignore the rest (or even create your own trimmed-down edition of the framework if you're not worried about doing it all again when a new version is out).

All the highlights I wrote about in this blog (and quite a lot that I didn't write about) are neatly organized in there. And the code's quality should hopefully speak for itself :)

Just to list some of the more interesting things, there's a Deque collection (faster than List<> and LinkedList<> and much less garbage), 3D vector font rendering code, 7-Zip content compression, a 3D SpriteBatch equivalent, rectangle packing algorithms for texture atlas creation, a flexible multi-threaded particle system, a work-in-progress GUI library with skin support, a cleaner game state management system, a debug overlay renderer and some helpers that allow you to automatically create VertexDeclarations from a structure without listing the VertexElements by hand.

So what are you waiting for, check it out! :D

This past week I've been working on my WiX XNA installer template again because I really wanted to integrate installer generation into my continuous integration builds. That way, I can hand test versions to friends without explaining in detail how to get it to run and it's one less worry I have when I release the game.

After some FAQ reading and some questions on the XNA Forums, I had the certainty that XNA 3.0 can be deployed with .NET 2.0 only (if you change your project configurations to target .NET 2.0). This is good news because the .NET 3.5 installer is huge and, on a fresh system, I've had about a 1 in 10 success quote of the installer finishing without an error, so my trust in the .NET 3.5 installer is completely shattered.