Fixed XNA Game Studio…

Blech… After much fussing and uninstalling and reinstalling, I finally got around to resolving my issues with XNA Game Studio Express. Apparently I was having all sorts of conflicts with assemblies and I needed to go through and get rid of them (apparently) VC# Express was throwing a hissy fit over assemblies that either VS 2005 or earlier betas of Game Studio Express had deposited.

That all being said, now that I’ve had more time to mess around with it, I’m rather impressed with it. Granted I’m not the biggest fan of C# (although I do find it more tolerable than Java), but for the most part I think it works out pretty well. Personally I would’ve preferred something more akin to Python than C#, but I can see some valid reasons for it (for starters it’d be relatively easy for example for independent J2ME programmers to transition and prototype their stuff in that environment).

A while back I read this article and for the most part agreed to most of what Dave Mitchell was getting at. I totally get the whole YouTube angle with the program, however I think a little more credit could’ve been given to those who trailblazed ahead in the past (e.g. Wonder Witch, Net Yaroze, and Develo). I think that was more of a fault of the interviewer as MS’s current (or at least apparent) vision seems to run along the same lines as Net Yaroze did rather than Sony’s strategy with Linux on the PS2 and PS3. Looks as though he was more interested in drawing comparisons with the PS3 than with either company’s efforts and encouraging independent development (figures).

Personally, I think ultimately they’re both just guinea pig programs just to see what comes out. Obviously MS’s approach has the benefit of generating revenue (always a good thing), and to me seems more of an incubator for indy game devs to emerge. Whereas the Sony approach is more of a sandbox where one just watches to see what somebody else tries to build in it. In Sony’s case, I don’t see it necessarily being game related (at least on the surface), but I do see lots of potential still there.

Cool toy, bad timing...

This morning I noticed that Microsoft announced the availability of their Robotics Studio, on their website. I’m not the biggest MS fan around, but I was messing around with earlier beta versions and I liked what I saw. Actually it’s visual programming language tool looks very similar LabVIEW, which is what the software that ships with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT. So much so that I wonder if it’s just licensed technology from National Instruments. In any case it’s not that important, and the nice thing about the MS tool is that it has nice out of the box support for some of the more currently hip robots (Minstorms NXT, and the Roomba), and some basic tutorials.

I’ve been on a bit of a robotics kick in the past year. I jumped all over the Mindstorm NXT when it was announced and pre-ordered several months in advance. In fact when I heard about it I was in the process of hunting for the RIS (RCX) kit since they were no longer made and you mainly had to search around on eBay for one. I’d wanted the RCX kit since it was announced but just simply didn’t have the money for it at the time (and I wasn’t as interested as much as I am now). On a side note, I recently found an RIS kit in a small nearby shop, so I’ll probably go pick that up sometime soon (assuming nobody else takes it). Lately since the NXT announcement there seems to be quite a bit attention being focussed on robots. Actually this is something that’s been slowly building. Obviously Honda and Sony had gotten a lot of attention in the past few years with their respective projects and products, but it seems there’s been a lot more attention in the news lately, particularly with Mindstorms (and similar hobby kits), as well as iRobot’s products.

However…. There is one series of robots, I’m sad to see not listed or supported or even mentioned at all with Microsoft’s latest release. My beloved little AIBO. Sony’s poor little (sadly discontinued) robot dog seems to be neglected in all this, yet was probably the big catalyst (IMO) for starting all this home robotics noise (if you wanna call it a craze). After all, I think it’s still one of the coolest robots to have. Not only that, but there’s a quite a bit of independent community around them, and they’re actually quite programmable with the AIBO SDE along with other tools like URBI, Tekkotsu, Pyro, and Cognitive Vision. Actually there’s quite a bit of stuff being done out there with AIBOs, however it just seems a bit sad that they’re not included in all this MS Robotics studio love. Granted they’re hard to come by now, and not exactly cheap (in fact some are going on eBay for more than what they originally sold for). I sorta wonder if Sony had released (say the last ERS-7M3 model) today if it would’ve gotten a lot more attention than it did back when the first ERS-110s came out (seemingly dismissed as expensive toys for the rich, ( in spite of the pretty good sales in Japan)). That all being said, I will continue on my quest to acquire an ERS-7M3 (preferably the champagne one) before they all run out. Even though Howard Stringer probably doesn’t see much point to continuing or restarting Sony’s robotics projects (not exactly a profitable group), I certainly would love to see the comeback of the AIBO…

Homebrewin’ on the 360…

So this morning Microsoft announced the (1.0) release of it’s XNA Game Studio Express. I tinkered around with some of the earlier releases, but it really didn’t really grab my attention too much. It still felt a little too limited and I hadn’t really had the time to see what one could do with it.

From what I’ve seen elsewhere with the 1.0 release, it’s a pretty nice clean piece of kit. I’m not the biggest fan of Visual Studio, nor C# (which you’re limited to), however it looks to be a pretty good way to get up and running with some simple game development. More interesting to me of course is getting stuff up and running on the 360. Unfortunately for me, I haven’t been able to get Visual C# 2005 Express to create new projects on my work machine. I keep getting those stupid “cannot open this type of project… blah blah blah” errors. Really irritating. I’ve poked around various forums and FAQs where other people have seen the problem, but none of the solutions seemed to have solved my issues.

Also currently my Athlon64 box is hosed right now, and I’m hemming and hawing over wether or not to either just get a Mac Pro (replacing the dual G5) and run my Windows on that, or building a Core 2 Duo system (I’m sorta leaning towards the latter solution). I’ve got an old AthlonXP box that I’m throwing together for my mother and her husband to use (mostly for gaming as they use their Mac Mini for regular stuff). I may just have to stuff one of my HDDs in there temporarily with my MCE install, just so I can tinker in the next week. Sigh…