Andrew Russell

14,505 reputation

32970

bio	website	andrewrussell.net
	location	Brisbane, Australia
	age
visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
	seen	5 hours ago
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Hi! I am Andrew Russell. I'm an indie game developer from Australia. I'm a Microsoft MVP for XNA/DirectX.

Visit my blog at AndrewRussell.net or follow me on Twitter @_AndrewRussell.

My current project is Stick Ninjas A 2D multiplayer platformer-shooter. I'm doing a weekly DevLog video series about it, which you can watch on YouTube.

My previous projects include:

ExEn, a cross-platform port of XNA that runs on iOS, Android and Silverlight
Light Blocks: cross-platform falling-block game to demonstrate ExEn
Dark: A 2D physics-platformer with fancy lighting effects (PC and Xbox 360)

	14,505 reputation	bio	website	andrewrussell.net	visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
32970 badges		location	Brisbane, Australia		seen	5 hours ago

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Apr 30	comment	Why is my model flickering when translating Does the flickering look like Z-fighting?
Apr 28	comment	XNA/MonoGame and Game Studio/MonoDevelop To be fair, MSBuild will do incremental builds via the command line, just like VS. Not sure about MonoDevelop.
Apr 28	comment	XNA/MonoGame and Game Studio/MonoDevelop You dislike IDEs?? *Programming without an IDE is insane.* Especially if you have the choice of Visual Studio. This isn't HTML. If you are somehow more effective without IntelliSense, you are a very strange person indeed. If you are more effective without a GUI debugger... well... I simply don't believe you. (I've used the command line debugger for C#, and it's not pretty. And if you're stuck doing "printf" style debugging... don't.)
Apr 28	comment	Program closes without Exception @FullMetal In your `Program.cs` file (as per the template), you can wrap `game.Run();` in a try/catch block to the same effect.
Apr 25	comment	Splitting tileset into individual tiles The only thing that I can think of is that you've somehow inadvertently removed the alpha channel from the image. Possibly by opening it up in an image editor that doesn't support transparency (like Microsoft Paint) and then saving it again. Try downloading the image fresh again, and testing it in a fresh XNA project with my above code. (If you need a better image editor, try Paint.NET or The GIMP.)
Apr 25	comment	DRY 0-bandwidth-overhead-serialization in C#: virtual, delegates or reflection? Just a note, taking a `ref` of a built-in type (like `int`, `float`, etc) does not box. Only casting it to an `object` will box.
Apr 25	comment	DRY 0-bandwidth-overhead-serialization in C#: virtual, delegates or reflection? @Philipp Don't be so sure - game networking has some fairly specific requirements and differences, compared to other kinds of serialization.
Apr 25	comment	Splitting tileset into individual tiles The white background, as in your screenshot? I'm not sure how you introduced that. I couldn't find the cause in your source code with a brief glance. And it doesn't happen in the code I've posted above (assuming a standard method of loading the original png with the content pipeline).
Apr 24	comment	Splitting tileset into individual tiles I'm not sure this really solves the problem - most of that sprite sheet is interactive stuff (monsters, loot, icons, graphs, etc).
Apr 24	comment	Splitting tileset into individual tiles You shouldn't be "splitting" them like this - keep them in the one texture and use the `sourceRectangle` parameter to `SpriteBatch.Draw`
Apr 24	comment	synchronizing view state between nodes in a rendering cluster Thrilled to hear it works :) If you can, you should post a demo to YouTube or something :)
Apr 22	comment	How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game? Perhaps take a look at this answer and maybe this one. Also perhaps look at this article of mine that, while on another topic, does have a good description of retained vs immediate mode (using Silverlight as the retained example, which is like WPF).
Apr 22	comment	How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game? @ZeroPhase XNA works very differently to WPF. Instead of a "retained" mode, where you create objects (instances of provided classes) and set their positions and properties, you have an "immediate" mode where you are given an `Update` and a `Draw` method, and each frame and are expected to redraw the screen yourself (you simply make your own classes). It's a bit more work initially - but it makes things a lot easier later on. Fortunately XNA comes with a lot of well-written samples.
Apr 21	comment	How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game? If XNA is an option, I would suggest switching to that. Making a game in WPF is both convoluted and miles away from how the majority of games are actually programmed. (Except perhaps games like Minesweeper or card games.)
Apr 21	comment	How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game? What is your motivation for using WPF? Because it really isn't the best technology to be using for this. Why not XNA, for example?
Apr 21	comment	How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game? Can you maybe post a screenshot (perhaps with annotations) that shows what you're trying to achieve?
Apr 14	comment	Is there any physics engine for XNA? @AreebSiddiqui Recommend Farseer. Box2DX hasn't been updated since 2009. Farseer 3 is also based on Box2D.
Apr 14	comment	Should I use a SQLite for this game? @Xerosigma I don't dispute the viability of key/value storage as an alternative to structured storage. What I'm saying is that you've listed some extremely heavy-weight, web-scale databases - while the OP is currently looking at something that is basically a glorified flat file.
Apr 14	comment	Should I use a SQLite for this game? As per my comment on the OP: If he's just using SQLite for local storage, then the solutions given in this answer aren't appropriate.
Apr 14	comment	Should I use a SQLite for this game? @Nicolas Do you intend to use this database for local storage (you say you're doing this with Unity) or on some kind of webserver with many clients? The appropriate solution is probably very different between these two cases.