30 June 2009
Things have been quite busy for me lately with starting a new job, finishing up my thesis, and some family medical problems that have been going on lately. This morning, though, I decided to go to work a little late, and write a tutorial instead! I've just created the Video Playback tutorial for XNA 3.1 users!
3 June 2009
It's been a couple of months since I updated this site! We had a "family emergency" that lasted for quite some time, and so I haven't been very worried about this site for a while. Also, now I've started my new job, which I'm really enjoying. In addition, I still have my thesis to finish up, so I've been quite busy. Soon enough, though, I'll be done with my thesis, and that will give me a lot more time to work on this site. Today I took a break from the usual stuff, and decided to start working on a 3D modeler. This is fairly similar to my normal editor that I was working on a year ago, though the goal of this is to be a full fledged editor. I have already implemented the winged edge data structure, and things are moving along. You can take a look at it on the Modeler page.
Hopefully, I'll have time to work on this website a bit more over the next little while!
26 March 2009
I've got a lot more stuff that I'm planning on doing with this website over the next little while. But for now, progress will probably be kind of slow. I'm finishing up my Master's thesis, and that is going to be taking up quite a bit of time over the next month, so don't expect any radical changes over that time. I'll most likely have enough time to answer questions in the forum or on individual tutorials though. And hopefully, also to make a few small changes here and there. Just expect progress to be slow. Also, XNA 3.1 has been unofficially announced!
25 March 2009
Well I haven't been updating this recent updates page, but slowly over the last month, I've been adding a troubleshooting page for each tutorial. I'm now done, and all of the tutorials have troubleshooting pages! Hopefully this will help me better understand where people are having problems with these tutorials, and improve them.
5 March 2009
I've been adding the troubleshooting stuff to more tutorials today. They're now in the Getting Started tutorials, as well as the 2D, 3D, and input tutorial sets. It will probably still take some time to get them in all of the tutorials, but I think it will really help people give and get quick and easy feedback, and I'll be able to improve these tutorials a lot for you guys.
25 February 2009
I've been doing a little here and there on this site, but I've been extremely busy lately, and haven't had too much time. Today, though, I got started on adding troubleshooting pages for each of the tutorials. This should give people instant feedback on problems that they might be having with the tutorials. So far, I've only added it for the Getting Started tutorials, but now that I've got the important stuff in place, it is only taking me about one minute to add the stuff to each of the other pages, so the rest should happen pretty quickly. I really hope that this will help me quickly fix problems or address concerns with these tutorials that you guys might be having.
6 February 2009
I've added a tutorial for reflection using environment mapping. Also, you may have noticed my little icons on the HLSL tutorials page, which I've begun adding to make it easier for people to see what the tutorial is about. Hopefully it is helpful!
5 February 2009
I've added a tutorial on making a skybox shader and added little screenshot icons to many of the tutorials on the HLSL tutorials page. I also uploaded a bunch of skyboxes for people to use. That leaves us with 65 XNA tutorials!
4 February 2009
I've done a few random things here and there, like I'm sure you've noticed some of the social network icons on the left panel. Also, I've fixed a few audio tutorials that were out of date, and added a new one about playing sound effects in a simple method using XNA 3.0.
25 January 2009
I've added a few more HLSL tutorials as well as redone the primitives tutorials now. This means that I've updated ALL of the tutorials! Today is a great day! At last count, I have 60 tutorials here, which is pretty good, I'd say. Maybe now I can slow down a little bit with these tutorials, though I'm still planning on adding more tutorials here.
22 January 2009
Well, now I've completed a couple more advanced shaders for the HLSL tutorials. I've got the bump mapping tutorial and the toon shader tutorial going. Both of these do things that BasicEffect can't do. I'm hoping to put a couple more HLSL tutorials online, but I think that for now, I'm planning on going over to the primitives tutorials, which still need some work.
21 January 2009
Over the last few days, I've been hard at work on the HLSL tutorials, and I've gotten quite a few up. This should satisfy the needs of many of you who want to learn more about HLSL and shaders, and more is still coming. I have tutorials that take you through the basics of shaders, HLSL, and effect files, as well as how to use shaders in XNA, ambient, diffuse, and specular lighting, and texturing.
18 January 2009
I've been working on the new tutorials for quite a while now. I finally got around to converting the tutorials over to the new organization that I've been talking about for months. The xna-tutorials page should look pretty different now. I hope no one got messed up in the process. The old tutorial organization is still around, though, and can be found on the old XNA tutorials page. Wow, this was a lot of work!
17 January 2009
I've completed the first three tutorials on HLSL and shaders in XNA. These tutorials cover the basic concepts of the programmable graphics pipeline, writing a simple ambient light shader, and using a shader in XNA. I'm going to be continuing on with this set of tutorials, but probably at a slower pace after this. I've got about five other tutorials in that set that I would like to do. Additionally, I'm thinking that this semester, it might be pretty easy to update the primitives tutorials as well. I also still need to update the ordering of the tutorials to make it more simple to get started.
14 January 2009
This semester will probably be a little lighter than last. So hopefully I'll have time to keep updating this site during the semester. Additionally, I am taking an advanced graphics class, which may make it easier to work on a lot of these tutorials, since some of the work I do for the tutorials can also count as class work. I am now complete with the basics in this plan. I just started developing my plan for .FX files and HLSL shaders. It will be a while before that really gets up and going, though. But I know people have been asking for it. Additionally, I might go back and rework the Primitives tutorials along with an advanced graphics class that I'm currently taking. Nothing has been decided for sure about the Guitar Input tutorial or the Bone Animation tutorial for now.
5 January 2009
Well, I've completed all of the necessary tutorials now, I think. I just got done with the custom content pipeline extension tutorial and it was a monster. I split it up into smaller parts, but there are eight parts! I think the previous high was three or four parts. So it was big. There are, in reality, ten more tutorials that I listed in the Battle Plan, but I might skip them for the moment. Two of them are going to be difficult until I get the resources I need (a guitar for the guitar input one, and a model with bones for the bone animation tutorial). Four are about shaders/effects which I will be adding more on soon, but there has never really been any tutorials here about shaders, so I don't feel too bad if I skip over them for now. The last four are about working with primitives, but I can't imagine that these would really be part of a decent introduction to XNA. Once again, I don't feel too bad about leaving them out for now. But I've already done the work for most of those in the past, when it was XNA 1.0, so I'm planning on updating them still. But I feel like the tutorials here are relatively complete at this point, and I might just go ahead and reformat the tutorials now….
23 December 2008
I got two more tutorials updated today, including the tutorial about the content pipeline, and the tutorial about collision detection. That leaves me with 14 more to go. Like I said before, though, eight of those are tutorials that I may not worry about until later. Additionally, there are two more tutorials that I might drop altogether. The guitar input tutorial has never been here, and now I don't have my guitar anymore. Also, the bone animation tutorial might be dropped because I haven't been able to get ahold of any models with bones. So I really only have four more tutorials that are *mandatory* to update: picking, mesh-by-mesh animation, a content pipeline extension, and a tutorial on 3D modeling programs. Don't expect me to update anything tomorrow or the next day, because it will be Christmas, and I will be visiting family. The same thing might be true for the day after that as well….
22 December 2008
I haven't been adding things to this page, even though I have made many updates over the last few days. Once again, you should check out the Battle Plan page to see my progress on updating my XNA tutorials. I now have 44 out of the 60 total tutorials up-to-date. Also, out of the 16 that are left, four are HLSL stuff that has never been on this site yet, really, and four are primitive drawing, which originally was one of the first things that we did, but I'm now going to push way back in the list of tutorials, since most people don't really want to do all of this. I might make the conversion to the new system before completing those tutorials and add them in later, depending on how much time I have over the break. But I still have at least eight more tutorials to go. I have been doing a couple of tutorials a day on average, but now I am getting to some of the harder tutorials, and progress is a little slower.
Once I have these tutorials done, I will be making a significant switch in the way users access these tutorials. YOU'LL HAVE TO PAY FOR IT! Just kidding! I've already decided that I'm not ever going to do that. But I'm going to be reordering just about everything, and categorizing the tutorials, and give users more options about what tutorials to do that better fits their needs, rather than forcing them down a linear path. I'm planning on keeping the old list still functioning for a couple of months for the people who have it built into hyperlinks on other pages and stuff, but eventually the old list will be removed entirely, since it is less effective.
I would also like to eventually add a few tutorials that go through the steps of making an entire (simple) game, to put everything together. I might possibly do a 2D and a 3D game. This is a little while off, since I need to focus on updating the tutorials first, and then I will also need to focus on finishing up my Master's degree.
Thanks to all of you who have made this web site so popular!
18 December 2008
Last night I got some more work done on this site. In particular, I completed a tutorial about managing content in an XNA game, and updated all of the stuff on the Battle Plan page, so that you can see what is left to do. I have about 63 tutorials that I'm getting ready, about half of which have been updated. Once the tutorials are in place, I will modify the main tutorials pages to reflect the changes, but I'll keep the old stuff around for those of you who link to the site, or for the people who have the URL memorized or something. After a few months of that, I'll eventually remove the old stuff, since the new stuff will be a big improvement over it.
17 December 2008
I'm finally done with this crazy semester. We are talking about doing several XNA Special Interest Groups for the ACM Student Chapter, and so I really want to make sure this website is up-to-date before the semester starts, because we could be going through the tutorials again. With the (little bit of) extra time that I have now, I've begun updating the tutorials again. Today I got done updating the Setting Up XNA and Creating an XNA Game from the Template tutorials. Take a look at my Battle Plan to see what I'm planning on doing. Also, let me know if you have suggestions.
19 November 2008
Well, I don't have much time for updating this site still, but things should get better after the semester is over. Today I reworked the CSS in the Forum, so it looks a lot nicer now. It used to have white text on a very light gray background, which was difficult to read. This is kind of a leftover from the orginal CSS, and I haven't gotten around to fixing the forum until now. So now things should be much more readable there. I've also decided to start keeping all of my update logs around, so now at the bottom of this page you can see older updates.
4 November 2008
While doing all of my course work, I've made two other small projects that I've put up here on the web. The first is my test practice program, Quiz Program, and the second is my web search tool, Web Pilot. They are both pretty primitive so far, but I just put up the second version of both of these. You should check them out.
23 October 2008
Finally! Java 6 Update 10 has been released! I've been waiting for this for months. It's about time. Now I can start expecting people to start using it on their systems, and I can use the Nimbus Look and Feel in my programs! This is really good news.
22 October 2008
Well, things remain very busy for me. I still have a pile of school related things that I need to do before I can worry about this website, unfortunately. I just wanted to make a comment that is similar to the one I made on October 8th. The last three days have all had the highest number of unique visitors of all time, each beating the previous day's high. This site continues to grow, and I'm excited about that. I'm really glad this site is helping you guys!
By the way, when I first made this site, I said that I won't ever start charging people for it, or clutter it up with ads. Of course, then, nobody was using the site. Now that it has become more popular, I want you all to know that I'm still going to keep that promise! I made the site for you, not for me! Let me know if there is ever anything that I can do to help you better.
18 October 2008
This semester has gotten extremely busy. It's been a while since I've even been able to think about updating this website, let alone actually doing it. The next couple of weeks are likely to be very busy as well. Perhaps after that I'll have a little break before the final push at the end of the semester…. Then maybe I'll be able to do something. Don't plan on anything new this week though!
8 October 2008
Well I haven't updated anything since the weekend, but I thought I would put a comment up here. Yesterday I had the highest page load activity ever for this site. I'm pretty excited about that! Ever since I moved these tutorials to Wikidot, I've been getting a lot more hits. And ever since I moved here, a Google search for me gets my website. (I don't think Google even crawled my old website.) Anyway, thank you all for making this site so successful, and keep letting me know how I can help you better!
