A bunch of issues solved

It has been a while since the last update and since then everyone’s been working really hard into making this something great. These past 2 weeks were filled with excitements, disappointments, relief and in the end that inevitable feeling of accomplishment that we’ve achieved something great. One day we solve a problem that seemed impossible to solve, the next day something new comes up that needs fixing. These kinds of ups and downs continued throughout the week although our persistence and dedication to the project made us push even more and not give up. After 1 week of insane research and coding we finally have our first prototype ready to play.

During the week we decided to add a physics engine to our project called Farseer Engine figuring this would solve all of our collision problems we had at the beginning and provide us with a better building ground to create our world in. This, however, brought another problem since xTile Rendering Engine and Farseer Engine don’t work very well together in terms of making a map created in tIDE Map Editor interact-able with objects created in the world.  The fact that tiles from xTile didn’t map out very well with collidable rectangles created with Farseer Engine, and that the viewport wasn’t moving in coordination to the objects in the world gave us something to worry about. After long hours of research and with very little documentation from the xTile side we’ve managed to surpass these difficulties and achieve a stable bond between XNA, xTile and the Farseer Physics Engine. Now, maps coming out of tIDE Map Editor are fully playable with physics and parallax scrolling.

Later in the week the only thing that seemed to be missing from our project was a game menu. With game states still not setup properly, we took some help from the GameStateManagement sample project from Microsoft and managed to setup a game state manager along with a game menu.

Wrapping everything up, we have a working XNA game prototype with maps created in tIDE Map Editor, fully mapped into a game world created in Farseer Engine and game states with menus drawn from Microsoft’s GameStateManager.  More to come..