Whoa Dang!

Posted in My Picks, Tile Engine, XNA on June 10, 2008 at 3:59pm.
There are 5 comments.

Looks like somebody took my tile engine idea and ran with it. This is just downright amazing. Nice work!

Sweetening The Pot

Posted in Tile Engine, XNA on April 23, 2008 at 10:43pm.
There are 2 comments.

I’m packaging up the ISOs for the tile engine DVDs (thank you to those who have already ordered one) and wanted to let everyone know that, in addition to the entire tile engine series, the DVDs are also going to include the Scrolling Text Box videos as well as the entire Alien Aggressors tutorial (code, content, and PDF).

So again, DVDs are $15 USD, CDs (2 because one can’t hold all of it) are $20. Here are the buttons again for anyone who missed them the first time.

DVD -

CDs -

And once again, thanks for supporting the site as much as you all have. I love the comments and motivation to keep making more tutorials. I should have some new videos to kick off the particle series in the next few days.

Tile Engine Video DVDs

Posted in Tile Engine, XNA on April 17, 2008 at 2:47pm.
There are no comments.

I’ve had a few requests so I thought I’d make a quick announcement. I am willing to burn and ship DVDs (or multiple CDs if necessary) for the tile engine series. This came up from people who had slow internet connections or other restrictions that prevented them from being able to get the videos.

That in mind I’ve decided to produce and ship some DVDs to anyone interested. The pricing looks like this:

DVD: $15
CDs: $20 (extra $5 for having to burn multiple discs)

I am going to always keep the videos as free downloads on the usual page, so this is purely optional. Each DVD will come with all of the video ZIP files and code ZIP files from this website so if you simply want them all as a backup or cannot download them, this is the chance to get them on DVD.

I am only accepting PayPal for these as I don’t want to give out my address for personal checks and such. If you are interested, simply send the money to the PayPal account nickgravelyn@gmail.com. Be sure that your payment includes your shipping address or that you email me the address so I can mail them out. (See Edit below for PayPal buy buttons).

Thanks for all the support so far. I look forward to seeing where I can take my site in terms of future videos and topics.

Edit: Got some PayPal buttons to make it easier for people that want them.

DVD -

CDs -

Tile Map Engine, Pt 14 (The Finale)

Posted in Tile Engine, XNA on April 09, 2008 at 8:04pm.
There are 15 comments.

Yes I titled it The Finale. This is my last episode in the series. Unfortunately, no, we don’t cover a battle system. I decided it was too big a task and I’m too busy to do it. So instead the video goes back to the editor to add a few features, fix a few bugs, and give you a good starting place For starting to save out your new XML files. Also unfortunately I just realized I deleted the project without zipping it up so there’s no code to download. My apologies for that.

However I am going to keep doing video tutorials, but I’m going to try to get a wider variety of topics. I want to start doing some shader stuff, more WinForm things, and probably some other assorted game programming topics. So if you have anything you want to see that’s related to making a game in XNA or a program in C#, let me know and I’ll see what I can do about sneaking in a video.

Also check back in the next couple of weeks for my submission to Ziggy’s article contest. My Alien Aggressors book is 35+ pages at this point and I feel there’s probably another good 20-30 pages left to write. But it’s coming along great and should prove a huge help to lots of people who are just starting with XNA Game Studio.

And with that here is the last video link I’ll ever give for a tile engine video (yes I went back to zip ):

Video: TileEngine14.zip 

Tile Map Engine, Pt 13

Posted in Tile Engine, XNA on April 02, 2008 at 10:41pm.
There are 10 comments.

First of all the biggest immediate change is that I’ve decided to start using the .rar compression method for the videos. The reason is that it provides almost twice the compression than .zip was doing for me. Luckily you can grab WinRAR for free if you don’t have a method for decompressing .rar files from here: http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar371.exe. That’s the tool I use for dealing with .rar so it’s real good. Sorry for the inconvenience but this is saving me space and bandwidth and saving you download time. I will be replacing all the old .zip files with .rar files eventually but I will obviously update the links so there won’t be any problems there.

On to the actual meat of this. In this episode we go through and content-pipeline-ify our tile map loading. We start by converting all of our layers to an XML format. And by the time we are done we can load an entire map with any number of tile layers in a single call to Content.Load<TileMap>(). It also helps us clean up our project because we no longer need to have the tiles or individual layers in there. Lastly this gives us some protection as well because now our map file, collision layer, and tile layers are all written as XNB files instead of the XML or TXT files making it harder for people to alter your game’s data.

All in all it’s really cool and pretty nice. This will however require a good chunk of work with your editor because we switched formats. So if you don’t care about doing this, it’s no big deal. We didn’t actually add any features; just simplified the loading.
So links for you all:

Video A: TileEngine13a.rar
Video B: TileEngine13b.rar
Video C: TileEngine13c.rar
Video D: TileEngine13d.rar
Project: TileEngineProject13.zip

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