July 2009 - Posts
We're excited to hear what you think of it.
The well-known sharing sessions should be visible in the share hub screen later this evening.
-Eric
Health bars of linked-clones did not properly expand when the number of hit points was increased.
Magic brush is no longer active when starting a new empty world, if it was the active brush in the previous world.
Autosave files occasionally stopped showing up.
Start button now toggles the mini-hub.
Sound effect while moving nodes up and down was being triggered too often.
Splash sound effects were being over triggered when water depth was very shallow.
Carried objects now match the couriers’ orientation.
Added an option to always invert the camera.
Mute now only mutes pre-canned sounds, not programmable sounds.
Fixed typo in Path help.
The Soccer Ball thought it could be programmed to move.
Zoom still occurred when in programmatic first person mode, which was disorienting when going back into chase cam.
Crash when opening the virtual keyboard with too long of a string.
Crash when opening example [say] tile from the programming help.
Crash while sharing with friends whose GamerTag’s used unsupported characters.
Softlock when adding more than 8 Lights.
Rock Band/Guitar Hero controllers caused the camera to spin.
Reset World was resetting scores.
Gaps in expressible numbers. You can now use up to 10 tiles, as well as several more number tiles.
The On Water sensor did not work correctly.
Only the first created object emoted.
Launching held objects did not work correctly.
Bots are now able to inflict zero damage.
Various graphical fixes in the Help screens.
"Technique: Change Behavior" showed two win messages.
The player did not lose in "Turnover", when the stick ate Black Apples.
Creatable objects now spawn at their creator’s height.
Don’t play the speech audio effect if the say bubble string is empty.
Corrected Wisp collision radius.
Camera was stuck in fixed offset while game is paused.
There was a problem with the mine’s animation blend weights.
Fixed a crash that would occur if the Xbox ran out of disk space while writing a file. A warning pops up now stating what's happened, and how to fix it.
Detect failure of storage media to prevent disappearing world issue.
Updated Gawlf: Classic Links so that the Kodu no longer displays shield effects.
Blips could leak through walls
Removed unused audio files to free up space.
Slowed down the rate that land is raised and lowered.
Increased the maximum number of programming pages to 12.
Ability to send worlds to friends in a sharing room if they have allowed others to do so.
Added “favorite” world tag.
Option to auto-download worlds marked with favorite tag.
The active tile in the options helix is now highlighted.
Increased the maximum health cap to 1000.
Increased the maximum speed that characters can travel.
Added 26 more score buckets based on the (English) alphabet. These scores are always invisible.
Ability to turn off collision, damage and healing effects.
Tweak to turn objects invisible (not visible to the user, other bots can still see them).
Tweak to make objects ghosted out (able to pass through anything, and are translucent).
If both Invisibility and Ghosted are set, the object will be completely invisible. :)
Added a dabber tool to make it easy to select terrain types.
Terrain types used in the current world are now placed at the beginning of the terrain picker.
Worlds now contain a credit listing of who worked on them. This is accessed in the World Options screen.
Ability to edit world tags in the Load World menu.
Added glyph for soccer ball: [ball], [soccer ball] (replace square brackets with angled. this editor won't let me use chars that look like html tags).
Added per-character tweak options to adjust the distance used by the “close by” and “far away” sensor filters.
Added per-character tweaks for acceleration values.
Added world tweak option to hide resource meter during gameplay.
Well-known sharing sessions can be joined without a friends list entry, allowing beginners to upload levels and download hand-picked levels without becoming friends
Brian scratched up some really cool Kodu tshirts. Since we did all the icons for the Kodu language in a resolution-independent format, they reproduce nicely at large sizes. Some feature one icon very large and a few have little Kodu code snippets - sort of a nerd joke with style.
Have a look - and notice that you can change the style of shirt or even have them printed on a hoodie or baby jumper
http://www.zazzle.com/kodukafe*
"Once you’ve selected your sprite, you are tasked with programming how it interacts with the game. For example, you can program it to react to “bumps” (running into another sprite or a world object). Or you can make it react to different buttons used on the controller. In the 2nd tutorial, you have to change the A button action from shooting a missile to jumping in order to make it across the river. Remember all of this is accomplished via the XBox controller using a visual action tree."
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/build-your-own-game-with-kodu/
Also includes a shout-out to our favorite forum:
http://kodu.moco.net/
Brian's just going nuts on the cool desktops. I've been out sick *cough* *cough*
Late-breaking stuff coming in the patch is much, much tighter control of character movement. We mean it. :)
I'm testing the patch tonight. We're considering it for playtest - probably tomorrow.
Can you identify the changes in this picture?
The fixes are:
- highlighting within the helix menu
- speed multiplier max raised from 2 to 5
- new object tweak turn speed mutliplier, same range as speed multiplier
Just got this cool new desktop from Brian. Enjoy!
There are two help systems inside Kodu that may not jump out at you but are quite handy, and will get handier over time.
The first is the character help, which inserts basic preprogrammed characters into your world. It's triggered from the menu where you insert characters, below.
Note the "Y" character in the tooltip. If you press Y at this point, you'll get the example screen for the selected character, seen below.
You can scroll through these examples and insert a preprogrammed character into your world.
Right now the examples are pretty basic; some characters have none, but we're looking at putting a few more into the refresh. Let me know if there's any you think would be particularly cool.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31755421/ns/technology_and_science-games//
Winda did a deep hands-on with Kodu, We talked for quite a while about why we did Kodu - why it makes sense from a research perspective and what we hope people get out of it.
I've been on Twitter a lot lately to keep up with real-time stuff as the community grows before our eyes. Finding some really cool worlds; I'll get a few of them written up for the blog, but if you want real-time updates my twitter account (mmaclaurin) is good to follow.
To catch up with mine and others' tweets, visit http://search.twitter.com and search 'kodu.'
Lots of Kodu going on in the twittersphere.
We survived, we launched, people are doing awesome stuff with it. We've got some bugs (many fixed,) and a patch in the works, but it's all looking quite good.
Here's to all our new friends...
One of the hardest parts of Kodu was launching without a central community. It's a long story; buy me a beer next time you're in Redmond and I'll cry into it for you.
What we have been betting on (big time) is that communities will start to self-organize, and they are. My favorite right now is http://kodu.moco.net, which is packed with very active, knowledgable creators. Lots of people are offering up their gamerTags and saying "share with me!" There's even one that's acting kind of like a server. Get in there!
Richard Mitchell over at Joystiq has done a very nice walkthrough video of creating in Kodu. His level design is cool - I want that level! Reminds me of Scramble, which I've been meaning to recreate for like a year now.
Richard, if you're reading this, you can program the rock too - you don't have to make the enemies damage themselve. There is an additional performance cost for every character that has a sensor (vision is most expensive, bump and hearing are cheaper,) but if you only have a few rocks at a time it shouldn't be a problem.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/02/video-tour-kodu-microsofts-diy-game-builder/
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