Recent Updates
9 May 2013
I checked my stats for my book sales for April. There was a significantly higher total for the month than any other month (and a gradual upward trend overall). Thank you to everyone who purchased my book!
I looks like as of yesterday, Amazon was actually giving a 10% discount on the book, out of their share. (Which is good, because their share is bigger than my share.) I haven't checked today, but if you're thinking about buying my book any time soon, it might be worth checking it out. Maybe you can save yourself a few bucks.
15 April 2013
Lest you start thinking this site is dead, I wanted to write a quick update here. This site is far from dead. I'm still actively working on it, and plan to do a whole lot more tutorials, especially in regards to getting the rest of the MonoGame tutorials up and running.
If you're having problems, and you ask questions in the forum or on the various troubleshooting pages, I've still been doing my best to answer those.
In the mean time, what's been filling up most of my spare time is the game that I'm making (and writing about the experience of making a game).
21 February 2013
It is time for you to go read this: The Future. A lot of good and a lot of bad wrapped up there. It's long. Do me a favor and take the time to read it all, when you get the chance. Then let me know what you think. Then keep calm and carry on.
19 February 2013
I've converted many more tutorials to MonoGame over the last few weeks. It should be enough to get you going, considering that the biggest two differences between them is the installation process and the content pipeline (or lack thereof), both of which are covered in the tutorials that have already been converted.
Additionally, you should check out the new navigation in the C# Crash Course! I'd like to get people's feedback on what works and what doesn't work about it, but this feature is something that I'll be rolling out to all of the tutorials eventually.
3 February 2013
I have begun the process of porting my tutorials over to MonoGame. MonoGame is an open source implementation of XNA. (More on the motivation for this later. Please check back soon.) Much of the stuff is the same, but not all of it. So while it will take quite a while to port them all over, for the tutorials that haven't been ported, you'll always have the option of jumping back to the XNA tutorials and seeing how it's done there.
At some point, I also will want to outline the key differences that I find between the two, because while they're supposed to be clones, there's definitely some differences.
30 January 2013
I don't know how many of you are interested in 3D modeling, and I don't how many of you are active users of Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange sites. But if you're interested in both, then you should take a look at this proposal for 3D Graphics:
I think it would be a great place for rookie/hobbyist 3D modelers like me (and maybe you) to ask questions to experts (also maybe you) an improve our knowledge and skills.
The problem is, the proposal has come along only very slowly. At the rate that it's going, it will take forever to get out of the Proposal stage, and even less likely to survive the public beta.
Go check it out, and if it's something you're interested in, be sure to follow the proposal.
11 January 2013
I just wanted to put out a quick update today, before the weekend got busy. I've received quite a few emails over the holidays, and I'm way behind on answering them all. I'm hoping to get some time to do so, but forgive me if it's a little delayed. I promise I'm still planning on getting to them.
In the mean time, you should all go play Pandemic and Eminent Domain (both board/card games). That's what I spent my holiday doing. It was totally worth it!
13 December 2012
I just got done tying up a bunch of loose ends with my C# book. This time, for real, if you helped me with my C# book and you didn't get the reward you were promised, please let me know so that I can get it straightened out.
Also, in response to a question somebody posted here, I created another new tutorial about how to extract pixel color data from a Texture2D: Extracting Color Data. It's in the advanced tutorials for the time being.
27 October 2012
No, I didn't disappear. I'm still here! Things have been kind of odd the last little while though, making it hard to get stuff done on this site. It's a long story, I'll spare you the details. It's not all that interesting anyway.
I've made a number of small changes, thanks to people sending me emails with questions, or reporting problems, so thanks guys for doing that. Your feedback always helps me make this site better.
In the mean time, what I've been working on is trying to get an eBook version of my book, in some form or another, available to all of the people who are asking about it. I had planned on the eBook being a piece of cake to do, but it turned out to be tough on a number of levels, and Amazon totally tricked me. :) Those are details I'm actually really interested in sharing with you, but not until I'm done with the eBook version, which should be fairly soon at this point. (I hope, I hope, I hope.)
22 September 2012
My C# book is finally available! This book will help you learn C# from the ground up. It doesn't assume you know anything about programming, but it will still be a good choice if you're a skilled programmer who is moving into C#. Note that this book is not about XNA specifically, just C#. You can consider it an evolution to my C# Crash Course. It contains much, much more than the tutorials do, and is better organized and cleaner. (Though I do plan to go back and clean up some things in the C# Crash Course to match.)
Note that I currently am offering a 20% discount if you order through CreateSpace, which is the printer for the book. The code to get this discount is K438N97R.
As always, if you notice any problems with anything (the purchasing process, the content of the book, etc.) please let me know about them so I can get them fixed for you.
If you helped in reviewing/editing the book, remember I promised you some rewards, and they're coming. If you don't get an email from me within the next 24 hours (let's say by the beginning of the 24th of September, regardless of what time zone you're in) please, please email me and let me know. It's possible I may have forgotten about you, or your name didn't get on the list.
17 September 2012
It's here! Three new tutorials, to wrap up the discussion of the game loop and timing in an XNA game! These tutorials cover the GameTime class in depth, how to configure your game to use fixed or variable time steps, and how to deal with a tricky bug in GameTime (that happens to actually not be a bug). All of these tutorials are currently listed under the advanced XNA tutorials, but I think eventually I'm going to pull them out into a new Game Architecture category.
10 September 2012
What I had originally intended to be a set of 2, maybe 3, tutorials on timing in games has expanded to 4! As you saw yesterday, I wrote #1 already. And now, I'm done with the next! But… I wrote #3 first, not #2. So I'm going to wait before posting it. When #2 gets finished, you'll get #3 for free with it. I don't know exactly when that will be, but probably sometime over the next couple of days.
9 September 2012
I just finished up a tutorial about the game loop, which is a design pattern used by nearly every video game to drive the game forward. XNA provides an implementation of the game loop, so you don't need to make it yourself. This tutorial will help you understand why and how the game loop helps organize and structure your game.
This is really only the beginning of a much larger push…. As most of you are probably aware, I'm in the beginning stages of making a set of tutorials that build a game from scratch. Start to finish. Along with that, though, there are a handful of tutorials that I'll need to write to lay the groundwork for that tutorial set. This is the first of those, and part of a set of three tutorials about fine tuning your game loop's waiting stage. So expect a couple of other tutorials very soon (as in over the next day or two) as follow ups to this one.
Lastly, as many of you are aware of, I was just about done with my book a month ago. I went out of town for a week with the intention of launching my book the day I got home. But the day before I got home, Visual Studio 2012, C# 5.0, and .NET 4.5 were all released, making my book obsolete before I could even get it out there. Fortunately, these new things only added/changed a handful of things, and I was able to update my book to include these changes. I suppose on the bright side, that means the market is now a bit thinner, since everyone else is needing to do the same things as me.
Anyway, once again, I'm just about there.
8 August 2012
I've got the final version of my C# book sitting here in my hands, and it's just about ready to go. I just need to do a little more work on the website, and get final approval from the printer, and the book will be available!
Once that's off my plate (I seriously wouldn't have even started on it had I known how big of a project it was going to end up being) I'm going to dive into the tutorial set on making a complete game from scratch. So that's literally just a few days away now!
9 July 2012
In preparation for the game-from-scratch tutorial set, I'd love to have your feedback and know what kind of game you guys think would be a good choice for basing the tutorial set on. If you have ideas, email me or post something in the forum.
8 July 2012
I got a lot done on my C# book today, and wrapped up looking at the edits that some of you suggested. I still need to make a few more passes myself, until I'm satisfied with it, but it's getting close.
7 July 2012
Sorry for the delay to anyone who has sent me emails over the last couple of weeks. It's been a very odd last little while. I came down with a nasty cold or flu that put me out of commission for a little while, and then my wife has been running into some strange medical problems as well. Fortunately, everything is getting better, and I'm getting back on track now, so I should get to your emails soon. I missed some work that I'm catching up for this weekend, so it may still be a few days.
I'm surprised how many emails I'm still getting about my book, so let me address that. I'm basically done with the reviewing part. I'm really just trying to finish up a few loose ends. I don't really need any more readers at this point, but if you really really really want to, I can probably get you a few sections to take a look at. This is especially the case if you're willing to read some of the later chapters that didn't get looked at as much.
I'm really almost done with the book, and in fact, I would be, had I not had so many problems the last couple of weeks.
19 June 2012
The book's coming along still… slowly but steadily.
In completely unrelated news, I just posted some directions for how to send me (or anyone else) your game, if you want me/them to take a look at it.
