July 2008 - Posts

• Anyone getting sick of clouds yet?

  <p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/P-Nw4CANeBc">http://www.youtube.com/v/P-Nw4CANeBc</a></p>

  So, here is the system (still not finished) with the skysphere and my infantile physics system. Again footage taken on my poop laptop so bit slow, but on my 360 it's a steady 60FPS.

  I think the flying ship gives a better perspective than the terrain, also I have altered the cloud shader to take into account the time of day, you will see at night fall the clouds are no longer bright white.

  As ever comment and ratings welcome.

  Posted Jul 18 2008, 03:45 PM by Nemo Krad with 13 comment(s)

  Filed under: Generic XNA, SkySphere, Clouds, Physics

• Speech in you Windows XNA Games

  I found this while messing about with the media player in XNA, just noticed there is some legacy code in the download from it :( Anyway, how to get speech into your games, it's dead easy really, you just need to have .NET Framework 3.0 and you have all you need.

  NOTE: You don't need XNA 3.0 for this just the .NET 3.0 Framework on your system.

  First off you need to add the System.Speech assembly to your project references, then in your Game1.cs add the following:

  using System.Speech.Synthesis;

  and in your Game1 class add:

  SpeechSynthesizer synth = new SpeechSynthesizer();

  Now, all you have to do is call the synth.SpeackAsync() method passing the text you want to have spoken. I used this:

  synth.SpeakAsync("Hello, Welcome to the Random Chaos Generic X N A Speech Sample." +
                                  " This sample is hosted by; the X N A U K User Group. Thanks " +
                                  "to Leaf and Robin for letting me host my blog here and I hope " +
                                  "you find my samples useful.");

  This will use the default voice that is set up on your PC (see Control Panel->Speech). But you can also access the other two voice types that ship with the OS (XP, not sure about Vista). To do this try any one of these:

  synth.SelectVoice("LH Michael");
  synth.SelectVoice("LH Michelle");
  synth.SelectVoice("Microsoft Sam");

  I prefer "LH Michael", reminds me of Stephen Hawking and I think it's a little clearer than the other two.

  I know, not the best chat in the world, but it's free lol

  Posted Jul 17 2008, 02:44 PM by Nemo Krad with 1 comment(s)

  Filed under: Generic XNA, Speech

• Yes, more clouds...

  <p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/XlG2nwv9QAA">http://www.youtube.com/v/XlG2nwv9QAA</a></p>

  Yes, been playing some more with the clouds. I have had the last clip playing on the 360 and it not drop below 60 fps, on my laptop I get about 7fps, and yes, my laptop sux!!

  So I have now put it with my dynamic sky sphere, and I think it looks pretty good. In the clip I am showing a few large clouds in a huge bounding volume against the sky sphere, then a large cloud field against the sky sphere showing the transfer from day to night and back again. I have not implemented lighting on the clouds but I think it still looks nice, the final bit of the clip is both bits together with an added mushroom cloud in the middle.

  Still much to do and as ever, very little time, but I am getting there I think, all though slowly :)

  Posted Jul 03 2008, 10:59 PM by Nemo Krad with 1 comment(s)

  Filed under: Generic XNA, Clouds