Kyle Schouviller

I got into the Age of Empires Online beta this weekend. It’s a beautiful game, and it’s pretty obvious a lot of good work went into it. However, when I was playing it I would keep getting logged out in the middle of the game. My wife, who was watching Netflix on our Xbox, kept getting logged out too.

Turns out, I can’t play a PC game and watch Netflix on the Xbox at the same time. Doesn’t matter that I can do things the other way around just fine. Doesn’t matter that I can log into an IM service from several locations. Their only suggestion to me to fix it was to buy another account.

Really?

So my short adventure with Games for Windows Live is at an end. I’m sad that I won’t be able to play Age of Empires Online or any other games using the GFWL framework.

Apparently, since I last touched SQL Server they’ve added some pretty awesome XML support.

SELECT
    SpecId as "@Id",
    Name as "@Name",
    Description as "Description"
FROM
    tbSpecs
FOR XML PATH('Spec'), TYPE;

Returns XML straight out of SQL Server. The best thing? The “TYPE” clause on the FOR XML part makes it return as an XML data type (which is also something new), meaning you can do some cool things like write functions that return XML that you can use to build up collections, which can be included in your XML (I use it for collections of children, pretty much solving the hierarchical data problem I always used to have).

I know this is really ancient news for anyone who works with SQL every day, but it’s been a few years for me, and I thought it was pretty awesome.

I played around with some XSLT last night and came up with a pretty nice-looking design for viewing Obsidian Portal’s offline backups. They’ll be adding them soon, and I’ll post one on here when they do!

Obsidian Portal is a great site for managing a D&D campaign. My group just started using it and it’s really a step up from anything else I’ve used. If you’re running a D&D campaign and want a little more tracking of characters/locations/events, I definitely suggest checking it out.

Also, the Cartographer’s Guild has some awesome tutorials on map making techniques.

Edit: It’s up! http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=476

Mike messaged me late last week with a challenge: make a game in under 10 hours and in less than a week. This is the result, from the bit of free time I’ve had after work:

You can download the game here:
Download the game

You’ll need XNA installed to run it.

I saw Brandon’s Xna Color Chart linked on Twitter, and thought it’d be great if the colors were sorted based on hue and value, so I went ahead and made some variations:

Large Boxes:
Colors, by Name
Colors, by Hue
Colors, by Hue (bands)
Colors, by Hue (luminance sorted)

Small Boxes:
Colors, by Name
Colors, by Hue
Colors, by Hue (bands)
Colors, by Hue (luminance sorted)

My favorite is the small hue bands.

Seems like forever since I updated.

What have I been up to you ask? Well, getting married to my sweetheart mostly. I also got a new job and moved to the Seattle area (all of the above within about 2 weeks). The dust has finally settled a bit, so I’m here to tell you that I’m still alive and kicking, and now live within a stone’s throw of Microsoft (literally – assuming I can throw something across the street).

I’m working at Digini (now known as Blade Games) on Blade 3D. What is Blade 3D you ask? I imagine you would – I didn’t know what it was when I first looked at it.

Blade 3D is a game engine with a full-featured IDE, built with XNA and covered in awesome sauce. At first glance it looks like a level designer. Delve a bit deeper though and you’ll find the extensible component system and the scripting system (scripts are written in full C#, complete with IDE!) Don’t like touching code? No problem! You can do all the logic through the logic diagrams – just add nodes of functionality and connect them together.

Basically, it’s a game designer’s dream. You can edit a scene really easily, then add gameplay logic just as easily. Don’t have art? No problem! There’s a marketplace with lots of free art, and plenty of really nice assets at a cheap price.

I really suggest viewing the video tutorials on the site for more information about the product – they give a pretty thorough look at all the different features. There should also be a trial version coming along soon.

So what do I work on? Well, I just finished a long two months with the FBX SDK. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll know how exhausting figuring it out can be. Not to mention it’s all in C++, which is a bear to fight with once you get really used to C#. After a long battle with the SDK though, I finally produced a very functional importer for FBX, Collada, 3DS and OBJ files. This replaces the outdated libraries we were using and gives us the ability to really spit-shine our art pipeline.

Aside from that, I’ve been working a bit on the logic diagrams system, as well as various other areas in the engine.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I got married, employed, and moved late last year – all within a span of two weeks. It’s been pretty crazy, but completely awesome as well.

The alpha is public! Tell all your friends!

Download the Windows Installer

Download the Xbox 360 ccgame (creator’s club subscription required)

Enjoy the game! It’s stable, has local multiplayer, and is pretty fun. Pablo did some amazing artwork, and it was great to work with. I’ll be writing something about those cloud shaders soon.

Let me know what you think. I’m still in need of some music, I need more art, I need to change some sounds around, I need more UI, etc. etc. But the game is ready for playing, and the more feedback I get, the better I can make it. I’ll be getting married in a few weeks, but one the dust settles and XNA 3.0 is out, I’ll likely be adding Live support to this game and putting it up on the Creator’s Club Marketplace!

That’s the plan at least – we’ll see how crazy busy my life gets.

More information is included in the readme file, which you should definitely read for the Xbox 360 version (it’s not included in the setup):
View the Readme

Ziggyware is running an XNA Article Contest from now until November 30th. Write an article on an XNA topic and enter it in the contest and you could win! The prize is an Xbox 360 Elite!

I’ll definitely be entering!

Read more about it at Ziggyware.

About two weeks ago I thought, “hey, it’d be cool to make a game in 24 hours.” That of course meaning 24 hours total, not one day. So I made up a design for what should be a small game, and started off. Then the design grew (as these things do), and the number of players grew (because competition is fun!), and I even added a velociraptor. However, I also had a lot of stuff come up over the last couple weeks, which made me lose track of my time entirely – so I’m probably somewhere between 24 and 48 hours for this so far.

So I wanted to give all you readers a preview of the public alpha I’ll be releasing by the end of the day (assuming I don’t get loaded down with real life priorities between now and then). It runs on Windows and Xbox, supports up to four players, supports mouse and gamepad control (and keyboard if it makes it in), and is pretty entertaining. I just need to stamp out a few bugs, clean up some more interface stuff, and work on the initial difficulty curve before I’m ready to put this up as a public alpha.

The art is almost entirely by Pablo Poffald, a wonderfully keen artist I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past. I added a few things here and there (and wrote a shader to emulate some Photoshop effects – look for a tutorial on that in a few weeks).

So if everything goes well, I’ll be putting up an Alpha of this later today, for both Windows and Xbox. I’ll of course appreciate any feedback and bug reports.

A little while ago I read through the engineering publications from Bungie. Some of the AI papers discuss one of the worst problems in game AI: recognizing the player’s intention. The next time I played on Xbox Live, I picked up my controller, put on my headset, and had an idea: why not use voice to help AI figure out what you’re thinking?

For example, if you say “fall back,” the AI could recognize that and do it. If you have the thermal vision of the group and you see enemies around a corner, you might say “enemies around that corner.” Even though you didn’t tell the AI which corner you meant, they could either guess, or – since they’re controlled by the game system – use information in the system to figure out which corner you mean. It’s cheating, but it improves the user experience, so it works.

So why isn’t this in games already? Aside from localization issues there really aren’t any barriers. Speech recognition works pretty well – it’s a bit slow and not always accurate – but that’s good enough to provide help to an AI in a game (not to entirely guide it – I’m talking about a layer on top of the normal AI you’d find in a game). The only other issue would be that not everyone has a headset. But if you only use voice to assist AI, you can still provide a quality experience otherwise. We should at least be seeing this sort of thing in top-tier games.

In fact, to demonstrate how easy it is to get some very rudimentary speech-driven AI working, I decided to code a little test tonight. I set aside some time for it and went to work. 15 minutes later I was done. Turns out .NET 3.0 has speech recognition built into the System.Speech.Recognition namespace. The result is this:

Download it here
(requires .NET 3.0 and XNA 2.0)

You say some variation of top, bottom, left, right or center to move the ball to that position on the screen. It’d be trivial to translate that into a 3D space based on a first-person perspective (though “front” might be a good word). It could also be more context-sensitive – e.g. maybe “on the left” after “the door” would refer to the left side of the hall instead of the player’s current “left”.

So what are your thoughts? Why aren’t we seeing this in games already? Are there games that do something like this? I know there are games that use sound recognition, but why wouldn’t the more popular games use voice recognition? I looked for patents, and there are a couple, but they seem very specific, and not really applicable to the first-person genre. Other than taking system resources (which with more powerful systems should be less of an issue), what reasons are there for this not being in games already?