dev in the making

zAnimation is finally on codeplex. You can find it here: http://zanimation.codeplex.com/.

It’s all very basic for now, no samples or documentation yet. The code is somewhat documented. I believe experienced people will have no problem using it. It’s just a matter of selecting the right content processor, checking out my past blog entry to write a definitions file, and writing model.Play(“Walk”); I won’t be working on the documentation or samples the next 2 weeks, my exams are still more important.

Hi!

On my zCamera project, I’ve added basic support for saving and loading.
The zBaseCamera, the base class of every camera provides this interface:

public virtual SaveSettings(string path);
public virtual LoadSettings(string path);

Save is done using the IntermediateSerializer, and load is done using XmlReader to support raw .xml loading.
See, the IntermediateSerializer output needs to be compiled at runtime in order for you to load it during your game. So no save/load sessions using just the serializer.

        /// <summary>
        /// Saves the camera settings.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="path">The path of the file to write, without the extension.</param>
        public virtual void SaveSettings(string path)
        {
            XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings { Indent = true };

            string fullPath = manager.Game.Content.RootDirectory + "\\" + path + ".xml";
            if (File.Exists(fullPath))
                File.Delete(fullPath);

            XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(fullPath, settings);
            IntermediateSerializer.Serialize(writer, this, null);
            writer.Close();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Loads the camera settings.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="path">The path of the file to read, without the extension.</param>
        public virtual void LoadSettings(string path)
        {
            XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(manager.Game.Content.RootDirectory + "\\" + path + ".xml");
            while (reader.Read())
            {
                if (reader.Name == "Name")
                    Name = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();

                if (reader.Name == "Debug")
                    Debug = reader.ReadElementContentAsBoolean();

                if (reader.Name == "FocalDistance")
                    FocalDistance = reader.ReadElementContentAsFloat();

                if (reader.Name == "FieldOfView")
                    FieldOfView = reader.ReadElementContentAsFloat();

                if (reader.Name == "AspectRatio")
                    AspectRatio = reader.ReadElementContentAsFloat();

                if (reader.Name == "NearPlaneDistance")
                    NearPlaneDistance = reader.ReadElementContentAsFloat();

                if (reader.Name == "FarPlaneDistance")
                    FarPlaneDistance = reader.ReadElementContentAsFloat();

                if (reader.Name == "Position")
                {
                    string vector = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();
                    Position = zCameraHelper.ParseFromIntermediateSerializer(vector);
                }
            }

I’ll release the complete source next week.

I’m having a blast playing with camera code in XNA. This is the third time I’m writing my own camera, and after I experimented a bit with various camera implementations including Quaternion rotation, Matrix rotation, frame-by-frame rotation, I can now say that I get the basic principles of every camera. And my goal is to make a light camera framework, with a couple of build in cameras and code for easier writing your own camera. Last night was really productive, as I wrote some messy debug code using the vector renderer component from Ziggyware which I’ve tweaked a bit to draw bounding frustrums and alike.

I’ll release the source when I write some more camera types, but first a couple of screen shots:

The package will consist of two projects: zCamera and zCameraPlayground which uses an early version of zGui, my gui framework for debugging purposes.

PS.
The model I used is the model from XNA’s Normal Map sample. If you see a problem in that, please leave a comment.