Oh my

Since my last post, the one about game design that included a discussion about using XML, I took another run with Microsoft's XNA studio. In particular the RPG toolkit.

Can you guess how it stores all of it's quest, item and character data?

Yup. XML. I'm building it at the moment, using the "release" configuration. For science!

While waiting I may as well say something useful... ho-hum. ICO is great, though I think I preferred Shadow of the Colossus.

When I saw that my counter had reached over 2000 hits I had a look at my stats again. Some interesting ones. I get regular searches through google, and some hits from Wikipedia. My main traffic comes from the Nosgothic Realm, which is fair enough. However, I've also been linked to through a quick-search on Facebook and Google's Orkut beta, which is basically Google's answer to Facebook. It looks a bit interesting.
Also, I've gotten hits to the main page without a referring link from someone in Japan using the "@home Network Japan" ISP. Sam, is that you?

There we go, build done... The XML files are transformed into Microsoft's own standard, XNB files... which are non-unicode files, so difficult to mess with.
On the one hand it is good - if you were to design an RPG and then give it to people, you wouldn't want it to be essentially you giving them the engine, leaving them able to mess with the data. That would be a bit pointless.
However it also makes it a bit more difficult - for example, if you wanted to create an RPG which was extendible, so people could make mods for it. Even if you didn't want to let them mess with your stuff, you might still want them to be able to add things. You would then need to make the program in such a way that it could also read the external files added by users, which may or may not be difficult.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The Japan one. Remember last time you posted about your stats, and you were wondering about some anomalous visitor from Sweden? Well, it's me again.
26 August 2009 at 16:30
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Godot - Rotating a Camera in 3d space

Image
For the past couple of years I've been dabbling about in Unity, but due to their recent PR disaster, I've shifted over into dabbling with Godot instead. The project I'm trying to create is a turn-based strategy game, which would include terrain. As such, units might be hidden behind terrain, so the user should be able to rotate the camera. To this end I've been following the Godot tutorials, creating a 3d plane, and putting a box in one corner so that I can see how the whole thing would rotate (if it were a plain plane, I wouldn't be able to tell it rotated). I didn't bother putting in a player character yet (as the concept is quite different to the example in the tutorial), but I did follow the steps  for implementing a camera. I wanted the camera to rotate by increments of 90 degrees (so there would effectively be 4 positions). Unfortunately, most of the maths in the documentation is about radians, which doesn't seem useful to me for this case, as it makes...
Read more

Commander Sterling

Image
I've been keeping this one under my hat, a wee bit. It's fair to say that I'm a fan of James Stephanie Sterling's work - I remember when they started publishing videos on the Escapist, and at first they weren't for me, though eventually I went back and got hooked. Seeing their transformation, and hearing their explanation about it, has definitely helped me overcome a great degree of ignorance when it comes to LBGTQIA+ issues. Since they started wrestling not just in England, but local to me, I wanted to make a doll of them to give as a present, which I managed to at the debut of Avant Garde wrestling: On a separate note, it was my first live show - I may do a bit of a write up, though I'm not familiar enough with the art to go much further than "I enjoyed it!" The doll itself is, like the other dolls I've made and intend to make, based upon the patterns in  AmiguruME by Allison Hoffman . The main differences to m...
Read more

Janos Audron Amigurumi

Image
This one has been in the works for a very long time, but last weekend I finally finished the amigurumi of Janos Audron that I've been working on for (no exaggeration here) - around 2 1/2 years! Let's get into the details. First of all, it cannot be understated how big this thing is: 1 foot tall and with a 2 foot wingspan tip to tip! This was, like the Sunny doll, based on the patterns in  AmiguruME by Allison Hoffman , though there were a few adaptations. The most obvious one is the wings. When I started these off I was using a Magpie pattern from Hanneke's Designs . However, the free CAL (Crochet A-Long) period ran out while I was working on it, and I didn't have a backup. Rather than buying it, I reflected and felt that the pattern just wasn't quite right. Eventually I managed to find this Pegasus by Crafty Designs , which I felt would result in something large enough with enough detail to satisfy me. I really am too much of a perfectionist, but not so much that w...
Read more