Game development, 1 step at a time.

Was playing around yesterday with the engine, and got parallax scrolling to work. With enough layers this effect looks pretty awesome if I say so myself. I’ve only used 2 layers of clouds, but that was just for testing purposes

Watch parallax-scrolling in action! (Basic Engine Test)

“Parallax scrolling is a special scrolling technique in computer graphics, seen first in the 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol. In this pseudo-3D technique, background images move by the “camera” slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D video game and adding to the immersion. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera technique used in traditional animation since the 1940s.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling (If you’re interested in reading more)

More updates on the DLSE (DuneStorm™ Level Editor). Has a working grid system now, snapping, better selection, a number of shortcut keys, better looking menu, some back-end code optimizations and a few other smallish things.

Updates on the DSLE. More updates coming soon.

Features Include
Primitive Shape Placement
Property Editing (size, position etc)
Physics Integration (Joints, Springs, Static’s etc)
Dragging/Scrolling
Level Config Editor
And many… many more! (and a lot more to come) … there’s actually so many I can’t even think of them!

Something I’ve started using lately, and quite like… is C#’s ‘?’ property. This allows you to flag a parameter in a method’s constructor as ‘nullable’. In other words, when someone interfaces with your method, certain arguments can be left blank or set to null. This save’s creating overloaded methods. An example of such a method looks like:

public void PrintString(String text, int? numberOfTimes)
{
     int number = 1;
     if(numberOfTimes.HasValue)
          number = numberOfTimes.value;

     for(int i = 0; i < number + 1; i++)
     {
          DisplayString(text);
     }
}

Hope this helps or makes things easier in some cases .

XNA supplies us with a KeyboardState, that we can use to check whether a certain key has been pressed. But, it doesn’t check if that key is being held down. This can be a problem in some cases… For example, say we want to open a menu when the user presses the ‘escape’ key. If we just did the usual check of myKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Escape) it would return true every iteration of your update function. This, would cause the menu to flash on/off multiple times and it gets annoying… fast. So, to fix this, create 2 private (or public) variables:

private KeyboardState keyboardState;
private KeyboardState lastKeyboardState;

In either your LoadContent() or Initialize() set

lastKeyboardState = Keyboard.GetState();

And at the top of your Update() function add

lastKeyboardState = keyboardState;
keyboardState = Keyboard.GetState();

Then, using a simple function

private bool HasKeyBeenPressed(Keys key)
{
     if(keyboardState.IsKeyDown(key) && lastKeyboardState.IsKeyUp(key)
     {
          return true;
     }
     else
     {
          return false;
     }
}

you can now check whether a key has been pressed, instead of just being held down! You can call it like so HasKeyBeenPressed(Keys.Escape);

Hope this helps!