In any event, it’s unlikely that Steam Cloud will be back-ported to many (if any) existing titles on Steam. That means I still need a solution for keeping my Peggle save file in sync between my desktop and laptops. :)

So if you’re a Live Mesh user, here’s how keep some of your PopCap Games save files in sync on Windows Vista:

Why “Effective”? Well, you could mesh individual save folders but I prefer to keep things simple. It doesn’t hurt if one of the meshed devices doesn’t have all of the same games installed as the others.

I plan to continue hosting this file indefinitely, so as always, you can download CDisplay 1.8 here: http://cdisplay.techknight.com/setup.zip

If you aren’t familiar with the mazes, you can see that something is wrong because the bonus fruit travels through walls!

• New graphics
• Sound effects
• Large 1280×720 playfield
• High score display and loading/saving
• Player is destroyed when the target crosses out of bounds at any time, instead of just the bottom of the screen
• Various changes to the target’s angle and speed of decent
• Projectiles are no longer fired unless the mouse button has been released from the previous click

The score display was implemented using the SpriteFont class and the Metal Lord font from Larabie. (The Larabie fonts are free for personal and commercial use. Found via this post on the XNA Creators Club forum.)

In the notes for Cannon III I said that I would take a look at using an Xbox 360 controller instead of the mouse… This kind of broke the quick movements necessary to play the game so Cannon Zero is mouse-only.

Download

Click here (extract and run setup.exe)

Screenshots

Video

Here are my favourites so far:

Here’s a video of Cannon III in action:

That wraps up XNA Xtreme 101 Volume 1. Before I move on to Volume 2, I’m going to make my own final version of the Cannon game. Probably with new graphics, sound support, and Xbox 360 gamepad support. I’d also like to fix the issue with CheckFire() being called too quickly – which is causing the projectile to be fired on BeginGame() and ResetTarget().

With iBlacklist, I just add a number to the blacklist, choose an action (auto-hang-up, straight-to-voicemail, etc), and I never have to receive an unwanted call or SMS again. The application keeps a log of what it has blocked:

That’s three unwanted calls in the last few days that I never even got a ring for! (According to 800notes.com, this particular caller purchased my information from a credit card company.)

It looks like the lessons could get a little tricky, as they were created with the XNA 1.0 Refresh. Version 3.0 is the current release, and I can already see that the content manager is structured differently. No problems so far though.

For fun I’ve changed the graphics and added sound effects using SoundPlayer from System.Media. I used a tool called sfxr to randomly create the sounds:

The graphical changes are the very worst in programmer art, but what the hell… Here it is in action:

Also, while I was looking for something else, I came across this tool for generating animated explosion sprites: Explosion Generator. Might be useful later.

Here’s a video of it in action:

The mechanics of the first implementation are complete, with the rest of the gameplay to come in the next lesson.

The objects in Cannon I are PictureBoxes loaded up with some simple graphics supplied by 3D Buzz. Here is the player ship firing on the moving target:

I worked a little on making my own original game with the engine, but in the end I wasn’t inspired. As much as I have fond memories of early text adventure games (Scott Adams’ Adventureland, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), it doesn’t seem like I have anything to bring to the table. Plus I’d rather get on with the XNA lessons.

I added a couple of things to the engine before I finished though:

• Lots of command aliases like “get” or “take” instead of “pickup”
• Directional commands are implemented differently from the way that 3D Buzz guys did it
• Partial text matching for items so that you can “drop gre” instead of “drop green ball”

So, that’s it for Hyperion. On to the next block of lessons.

I’ll work on a proper Wordpress theme soon.

Yum!

The RSS feed might become temporarily cluttered as a result.