New C# and the installer tutroial for .Net 4.5 coming soon!

Since I’ve posted the tutorial on .NET and the installer it has maintained a good following. I believe that this has helped out a lot of you when it comes to personal projects or work questions that you might not have otherwise gotten the answer to without coming here.

Because of this I’m re-writing this tutorial in .NET 4.5 to bring it up to date for those of you struggling to get it work in the newer frameworks. I just wanted to drop a quick note, if you’re having issues getting the current tutorial working just hold up, I’ll have a new one out here soon.

Thanks for the support guys.

Sky Domes are neat, so are day night cycles!

Finally got it working in my proof of concept. Rather than explain the details just watch. I asked for help creating this as i know next to nothing about HLSL, but none the less check out my question here and you should be able to pull it off!

Here is the video:

YAPU – Yet another project update

I’m realizing now i haven’t posted any progress on the project in a little while, hence the post. We’ve been slowly moving forward, mostly with the terrain generation, its actually looking pretty neat at this point so i feel like i should post something:

As you can see from the screen shot above we’ve been refining the process of our random terrain generator. The terrain you see here is procedural and will be different each time we run the application. If you can make out the FPS marker there, its around 4 FPS… that’s horrible. I’m the one tasked with increasing performance, I’m working on occlusion culling at the moment, this has proven to be a big pain in my ass but none-the-less if i get something working good I’ll try to post a tutorial or something.

So far things are going good, we’ll be able to hopefully have some kind of video up pretty soon that all depends on what kind of blocks we run into between now and then. Happy coding!

XNA Project Update 12-29-2010

I’ve made a little bit of progress since the last post. I have begun the work on a sky sphere, after doing quite a bit of research on the best way to do things, I’ve decided that no matter the difficulty a gradient sky sphere is going to be the most dynamic for what i would like to do, now i just need to figure it out…

So far i have the sky sphere correctly moving with the camera, now i want to be able to shade this and have it change realistically from day/night and visa-versa. So starting from here, lets see where this will go, wish me luck I’ll need it:

New XNA Project

Wow, how long has it been since I’ve made a blog post? Seems like its been quite a while, and according to the dashboard i think it has been.

I’ve been working on a new XNA project in my free time lately. The basic idea is to create a terrain rendering system, and a small RPG style game that is fairly sandbox style. It seems as though things are falling into place, things have come pretty easy thus far and i feel like I’ve made good progress. Check out this screenshot:

One Region Rendered

This is one successfully rendered region of the terrain, I’m working with one other developer who’s task currently is to generate some sort of neat terrain layouts and come up with those algorithms. I want to keep the project as procedural as possible, with no set “maps”.

We’ll see how it goes and i’ll provide updates as we work. Maybe i’ll even get around to writing some tutorials for you guys as it seems my windows installer tutorial and XNA stuff has taken off pretty good. Stay tuned!

Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug the server.

Today I was encountering this problem, it would appear that its kind of hard to re-create but in the event that you are running domain websites locally on your machine you use what is called a “Loopback Check”. Not quite sure excatly what the check does, but during that process you will lose your authorization to debug a web application.

In order to fix the problem I located a thread on the Microsoft Support website with two available options. For me I added the domain name of the website that I’m referencing locally to the registry in MSV1_0 under a new Multi-String value called BackConnectionHostName; in this case: local.feature.somesite.com and it worked like a charm!

For more information on how to resolve this issue please visit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Ubuntu

Last time i used Linux was back in middle school, i installed Linux Mandrake on my computer and it was a little tough for me to get up and running on. Back then I pretty much had to find or make the drivers to get connected to the internet and all that good stuff. Recently, with the crash of my extra windows laptop, i decided that i wanted to give linux another try. After talking with a few people about what distro to get, i ended up going with Ubuntu.

Installation was pretty easy, i tried burning a CD, which in turn failed on my windows box… Figures. After that i decided that my best bet was to use my extra thumb drive and just use the application listed on the Ubuntu community website to format it into a “LiveCD” style Ubuntu boot disk. I booted that right up the first time from my laptop and just had to double click the installer on the desktop. It took care of formatting everytihng for me and getting it up and running on the disk.

The more I used it the more it has grown on me, and now i have my entire PHP development enviornment up and running and its working great. It took a little getting used to, but wasn’t so bad with all the information you can find off of their website or just in general off of google.

My advice to anyone who wants to switch from windows to a linux distro. Try Ubuntu. Easy setup, and a great way to start learning the open source os community!

Outlet ORM

If you’ve ever tried to use an ORM to create a data layer in PHP, then you know its not always as easy as it seems. Not to mention if you actually have to change a relationship, you could be digging through thousands of lines of code for days. Not anymore, a friend of mine has created Outlet ORM, although in its early versions it’s well worth taking the time to learn.

I think that he does a fantastic job of explaining outlet:

“Outlet is an open source object-to-relational mapping tool for PHP.

It differs from other orm solutions for php in that it provides transparent, unobtrusive persistence. It does not require your entity objects to implement any interfaces or extend some sort of base class. It is also very lightweight, only a handful of classes and tools.

It uses an approach similar to hibernate in java, using proxy objects that save the data behind the scenes.”

From my experience so far its a fantastic tool to work with in PHP, it has definitely made my work in PHP quicker and more organized by creating objects for my database calls. It also takes care of saving/updating/deleting items for me in one easy call, EVEN if they relate to something else and need to be deleted. Great tool, check it out at http://www.outlet-orm.org.

Excel 1904/1900 Calendar. Confusing.

Recently I had quite a fun experience with Excel and Mac/PC compliance. Not only that I found out something that I didn’t even know was possible in Excel. Go figure though, there’s always something weird when it comes to being platform agnostic.

I work with Excel spreadsheets on almost a daily basis, my job is to take that data within those sheets and store it into a SQL database. Usually this goes alright, minus the forumla problems and hidden columns and ceels, although I must admit I’m pretty good at finding all of Excel’s little secrets by now. Last week I was lucky enough to get the worst file I’ve had to deal with yet.

This file just needed to get into the database so that we could finish our job for the day and go home. Easier said then done about 4 hours later! To make a long story short, the Excel file happened to be opened and edited for a little bit on a Mac. The transition from PC to Mac went just fine, but somewhere along the line transferring it back to the PC, we ran into a very interesting problem.

Upon transferring the file into SQL, we were noticing that the dates would come up 1 day 4 years behind what the values actually were. After fudging around the internet I found a few sites that explained it a little more.

Excel on the Mac is defaulted to use the 1904 calendar system; where-as PC is defaulting to the 1900 calendar system. Luckily there is a place where you can change this option, it sounded like a simple fix so I clicked the office button when to excel options and changed it. Perfect! My dates were now displaying correctly, I can import this and go home!

Not so fast… Once imported to SQL, the dates would still come up 1 day 4 years back. So what was the eventual fix? There was some talk about using macro’s to adjust the date, but in reality we could either change all dates to be 1 day 4 years ahead, or we could switch the mac to using the 1900 calendar system.

By this time we didn’t know what date’s were suppose to be the real dates anymore, but finally got it worked out. I guess the lesson here is: make sure that you know what calendar system both the Mac and the PC are using before you transfer Excel files across them. You don’t want to end up with a 60 thousand line file and have to change all the dates back by hand!

Another day… Another challenge.

Digital Rights Management, If you’re going to do it do it right!

I recently had my first bad experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management) software loaded on a particular game. I’m not going to mention the game or the company because first of all they aren’t at fault. The Publisher may be, but in the end it doesn’t matter, it’s more than obvious the PC gaming industry is going this direction, and you may be surprised to hear I’m okay with that, under certain conditions..

Within the past 3 months, I’ve installed my operating system three times. Unfortunately for me most games sproting this awesome new DRM software only allow you to re-install three times. There were some games that I had installed on my first OS, which i knew had the DRM, these I didnt re-install the second time i did my operating system because I knew i would run into problems and didn’t want to have to deal with it.

One game however has made me particularly upset. I purchased said game from steam, who as most of you know arleady does quite a bit to thwart the pirating of games through the steam engine. Needless to say, I ran into a DRM issue with a steam game and didn’t quite know what to think at first. So steam will already make sure I’m logged in, have purchased, and have valid files/keys/etc… Now on top of that I have to hit a DRM server to make sure that I’m not stealing their game? Thats a little overboard.

I decided that I’ll give this DRM thing a chance and went to the games website, to their support page and sent off an e-mail. Although i don’t have the exact text this is about what I said:

“<Game Company Here>,

Recently I purchased a copy of your game off of steam, since then I’ve had to re-install my OS three times, as i’ve upgraded from XP, to vista business, to ultimate. Now that I have my system at its normal running state I’m ready to start playing the game again. Is there any way i can get more DRM activations or at least be pointed in the direction to get some more?

Thank you,

 

 

Wade”

I thought that it was a pretty nice e-mail, however it’s been two weeks and i havent even gotten as much as an auto reply. 

So I ask you game publishers, if you’re going to use a DRM, make it like you make your games, and spend the extra time to MAKE IT RIGHT! Let me activate/deactive my installs or at the very leasy, have a call center than is ready and willing to help me play the game which i purchased to help support your company!