The Blog of Zachary Snow

WinQuakeCon

Zachary — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:34:10 +0000

I’ve always wanted a program that would allow me have a command line that I could slide in and out of view as needed like the console from Quake. I never could find one and so I finally got decided to write a tool myself. A picture is below and the source code is on GitHub.

I’m not putting a download here as I don’t consider this finished just yet.

BitBucket Snowball Repository Now Official

Zachary — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:09:00 +0000

I’ve decided to start using the BitBucket repositiory as the official Snowball repository. I’ve been keeping the code updated both there and at Codeplex the best I could but I’ve decided to flip which one is the primary. I’ll still continue to keep the code updated in both places but I’ll be using the Issue Tracker from BitBucket.

https://bitbucket.org/smack0007/snowball

What is Snowball and what do I want to do with it?

Zachary — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:30:47 +0000

I originally got the idea for Snowball after working with the Xna Framework. The Xna Framework is a good piece of software for what it is but there are some things about which I just do not agree with:

The content pipeline only works with content in the serialized .xnb format.
There are certain content types which can only be loaded via the content pipeline.
Certain features don’t exist on the PC because they don’t exist on the XBox or Windows Phone 7.

Xna was designed as an abstraction layer for all the 3 platforms mentioned in the last point, so that one is somewhat understandable. I don’t want to write games for my XBox right now though, so why should things like drawing lines not be available to me?

With these points in mind I started working on Snowball. It’s designed to be an Xna like framework for making 2D games. It uses SlimDX on the backend, but that is completely abstracted away from consumers of the framework. What I want to do is design the API so that the backend can be swapped out somewhat painlessly.

I still have a ways to go before I will consider it a version 1.0 release. As of this writing, I’m transitioning to more of a ContentLoader class style for loading your game’s content. Any resource type from within the framework can be loaded by hand if you want, the ContentLoader class will just make it easier. After that I have a few other features like GamePad and Music which I would like to implement before saying I have a Beta type release.

The future after that is up in the air. I would love to try and have different implementations of the API for Xna and/or OpenTK.

I recommend for anyone who is interested as to why an API designer choose to implement the API in the way they did to try it for themselves. I have learned many things from this project including why certain design decisions were made by the Xna Framework team.

Codeplex Working Again

Zachary — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:50:51 +0000

The Codeplex Snowball repository is finally working again. It had to be wiped out but I had the repository locally again. Codeplex will remain as the main site where I host Snowball but Bitbucket will continue to be updated.

Deleted GitHub Account, Codeplex Still Busted

Zachary — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:22:02 +0000

I’ve been unable to sync my code to GitHub with any success as of late. With that said I decided to delete my GitHub account and give up on trying to keep Snowball updated there.

The Codeplex site is still busted but I won’t be deleting that anytime soon. That means the only place that really has my latest updates is the Bitbucket repository.

Of Broken Repositories and Grief

Zachary — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:17:15 +0000

Sometime at the beginning of this week my Codeplex repository for Snowball busted. I wrote them and hoped they would fix it asap. As of this writing it is still not fixed and I have not had any response from them.

So I then decided to try and pump my source code up to github. Although I was successful with the help of hg-git, eventually my local repository became corrupt. All the code in the working directory was ok of course, but I was unable to make any commits to the repo. I pulled the latest backup I had locally of the repository and decided just to fork off from there.

I then decided to give Bitbucket a try. I figure the more options the better. I still really like the way Codeplex is set up. I like the social aspect of github but codeplex seems more structured to me.

Going forward I’ll try to keep the code updated in all 3 places. Pushing to github is not a huge priority to me as it can be a little tricky pushing from mercurial to git, but I will try my best.

I’ve added a Samples folder to the repo now which I hope will help provide some kind of how to get started. The Walking Wizard sample shows the basics of getting a sprite of the screen and making it move with the keyboard.

WMI: Converting datetime values to DateTime objects

Zachary — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:35:55 +0000

Just a quick post to hopefully save anyone who finds this some time. If you need to convert a datetime value from a WMI query to a native DateTime object in C#, you can use the method ToDateTime() on the … Continue reading →

Snowball: A Slightly Different Direction

Zachary — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:30:03 +0000

At first, I had imagined Snowball, now located on Codeplex, to be a framework which would define how your game objects look. I.E. I had a class called GameEntity which I imagined would handle a lot of boiler plate code for you such as setting up Initialize(), Update(), Draw(), etc.

I’ve decided to move away from that and let Snowball purely focus on the subsystems of a game, such as Graphics, Sound, Input, etc. Extending from the Game class completely sets up these aspects of your game for you. I think I will include helper components, such as a collision detection system, but I will not force you to use them.

XAudio2: Stop Currently Playing Sound

Zachary — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:22:40 +0000

Using SlimDX, if you want to stop a sound which is currently playing via XAudio2, use the following methods on the SourceVoice object:

sourceVoice.Stop();
sourceVoice.FlushSourceBuffers();

Zune Playlist / SMIL Copier

Zachary — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:40:50 +0000

I needed a tool that would copy the contents of a Zune playlist to a given directory. I did a bit of googling and I couldn’t find anything, so like any good nerd I wrote a tool that did.

The format of Zune playlists is a simple XML format known as SMIL. I think Windows Media Player also stores playlists in this format but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

I wrote the tool very quickly and have only tested it on my machine with my test data, but I’ll provide the source if you’d like to modify for yourself. The source is C#.

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