Dr. Ace's Clinic for Bugs and Errors

[Dr. Ace]

Hello and welcome to Dr. Ace's clinic for bugs and errors.

I see you're trying to make a video game, good, I love video games. Having been an active member of this forum till three years back I've decided to come back to check out how things are going. And it seems it's quite dead, but maybe not dead enough to bury yet. So for this reason I open my new clinic. You're making a game and you have a problem? Let me know! Maybe I or one of my lovely assistants can help you out. No promises to a solution but we'll definitely look into it, so let me know.

Dr. Ace's is familiar with:
- ActionScript 3
- Some Java
- C#
- A teaspoon of C++
- A slice of Unity
- XNA
- Blender
- Autodesk Maya
- 3D modelling in general
- Sprite art

But do ask anything because I can learn from your mistakes as well.

~ Dr. Ace

[zuhane]

Nice to meet you dude! I've barely been on these forums recently because activity has seemed rather scarce and people don't really tend to
make games as much, which used to rope me in. I'm working in XNA these days, so I may message you if I get stuck on a few things (mainly
cameras and matrices)

[Dr. Ace]

Nice to meet you dude! I've barely been on these forums recently because activity has seemed rather scarce and people don't really tend to
make games as much, which used to rope me in. I'm working in XNA these days, so I may message you if I get stuck on a few things (mainly
cameras and matrices)

As a pre-emptive strike, I'm already going to share Riemers with you, because he has a ton of great tutorials especially concerning cameras and matrices in XNA.

[fruckert]

Finite state machine design is something that I've been having quite a bit of trouble with lately.
The language is C# using MonoGame (because XNA is getting shut down and I want to be multi platform), but the important bit is the theory. I can read basically any C family language.

I'm also going to check out that cameras and matrices thing because I'm not great at those either.

[Dr. Ace]

To start with I'm referring you some theory with Wikipedia and this thread on Stack Overflow. Now if this still does not make clear, is there a specific behaviour you want to program that requires a state machine because I could then use it as a closer-to-home example for you.

In summary:

A finite-state machine, or just state machine, is a programming technique used to switch behaviour of (a part of) the system. Wikipedia uses the examples of a vending machine or elevator, reacting corresponding to a state. For the vending machine the following example: enough coins inserted can switch the state to from "inactive" to "active" and a button pressed in this state to switch it to "dispense drink", when the action has been done the state is switches back to "inactive". You could also use a state machine to program AI behaviour, an enemy changing it's state from "stationary" to "attacking" when he spot the player and back to "stationary" when he lost him in the simplest form.  Programming state machines can be done in several ways, it can be done in the example using enums and functions, you call it in an update loop to keep checking or the function specifically when an action is performed, you could use integers or strings for it.

[Momeka]

Finite state machine design is something that I've been having quite a bit of trouble with lately.
The language is C# using MonoGame (because XNA is getting shut down and I want to be multi platform), but the important bit is the theory. I can read basically any C family language.

I'm also going to check out that cameras and matrices thing because I'm not great at those either.

I could recommend reading this to get the basics.

[zuhane]

Thanks for the link, dude. Read quite a lot of it now, and my degree helps me to constantly push
forward with my XNA development. Oh yeah, I heard about XNA getting shut down. Does this mean I won't
be able to distribute for PC using XNA, or is it just support and 360 etc?

[fruckert]

I'm honestly not sure.
I do know that MonoGame is legal, though, because it's a separate implementation.

[Dr. Ace]

From what I gathered, and Momeka might have to correct me here, is that they abandoned the development of XNA, meaning you can still create games for current platforms but that future platforms (Windows 9 and the new Xbox) will not support it and no further updates will be released. So you can still use it to make games.

MonoGame is an open source implementation of XNA 4.0 (says their site), meaning it's legal and free to use. Support on this is separate from XNA and I'm expecting it will be continued considering the nice solution it forms for multi-platform development.

[zuhane]

Ah great! I'm all about PC development anyway, and since the PC hardware shifts in a gradient instead of a new generation of
PC every 6-ish years, that should be fine. I'll check out Monogame in this case, because I've grown pretty accustomed to the XNA
framework. I'll post what I have up in the next couple of days, because I've made a weapon hierarchy and would like to check that
I'm going about it the right way! I'd give more details on our game (which we're aiming for a Steam release on), but barely any of
it is in a playable state, so it's mainly art resources and testing at the moment.

[Momeka]

From what I gathered, and Momeka might have to correct me here, is that they abandoned the development of XNA, meaning you can still create games for current platforms but that future platforms (Windows 9 and the new Xbox) will not support it and no further updates will be released. So you can still use it to make games.

MonoGame is an open source implementation of XNA 4.0 (says their site), meaning it's legal and free to use. Support on this is separate from XNA and I'm expecting it will be continued considering the nice solution it forms for multi-platform development.

I'll go ahead and correct you, XNA games do not work on windows 8. You can however build for windows 8 with MonoGame. Not sure how it works though, been meaning to look into it but haven't gotten around to it.