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Monday, August 6, 2007

KOL Downtime and an XNA Book Review

So its 11:30 pm again... I hate when KOL goes down. It makes me very sad. I wonder what they do every night that requires the server to go down. I wonder if it just takes too much server time to update everyone's adventures. Any who... I went bowling tonight so I didn't get a chance to work on my game today but I did read some of the new XNA Game Studio Creator's Guide by Stephen Cawood and Pat McGee.

Here is my opinion so far: I don't know how long ago they wrote the book but it seems like there are better ways to handle some of the stuff they are doing, I wonder if they wrote it after the refresh. Maybe it is just my pet peeve that they use underscores in method names or what but their coding style is so far atrocious. Also they use Quake II models for animations, I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet (I am on chapter 4 so far as I just got the book Saturday - Shaders WOOT!) I am hoping that the chapter on the Quake animations will give me some insight on how to make Maya animations work in XNA since I am using the .X exporter for my models. Also it seems like there might be some good info on some geometry and Quaternion I might be able to use for camera controls and better character/obstacle control. I did notice though that the collision detection section was lacking in any sort of complex vertex collision on meshes. :(

I'm crossing my fingers...

Ill write more of a formal review once I have finished the book. I am disappointed that I can already tell that this book is simply too basic for what I want to do with my engine. Oh well... at least it will make some interesting reading for a few days.

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