Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'kodu'

Kodu Patch 2 is Live Now on XBox 360

mattmac — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

- big perf gains for world-sharing (upload, download, and browsing)

- scaleable characters

- lots of small fixes and little surprises - see previous posts for details

Thanks again to our awesome, awesome peer review community on the XNA Creator's Club.

How World Sharing will work in PC Kodu

mattmac — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

PC Kodu is going to have file import and export for Kodu Worlds. This will let you export a world, email it to someone, and have them open it using Kodu on their machine.

The goal is to enable you to use *any* sharing mechanism to share Kodu worlds. Want to make a gallery? Great! Use your favorite tool.

We do have internal community server tools but we only have resources to give them to some institutions. We're looking into sharing this more broadly; it's a pretty optimal Kodu sharing experience (don't have to select server.) We may just publish the protocol as it's small and clean.

Eric just checked it in. Here's his design.

- There are two special folders at the root of Kodu’s user space (below Documents/SavedGames/Boku/Player1). One called Imports, the other called Exports.

o Imports folder behavior:

§ Any “.kodu” files residing in this folder will be imported into the user’s Downloads bin whenever the user enters the load level menu.

o Exports folder behavior:

§ A new option is available on the load level screen’s “pop-out” menu called Export (it shows up underneath Play). This action will export the selected level to the Exports folder, as a .kodu file.

§ Export is not available for builtin worlds.

§ Terrain will not be exported if it is from a builtin world.

- The new installer registers the “.kodu” file extension with Kodu.exe, allowing the user to import a level by double-clicking on a .kodu file.

o This action will import the level to their downloads area, then take them directly into the level in play mode, similar to how trial mode works.

o If another version of Kodu is running when the file is double-clicked, the second copy of Kodu will copy the file to the Imports folder and then exit. When the first copy of Kodu navigates to the load level menu, the new level will be imported.

- Level metadata now contains the version number of the Kodu that saved it to disk. We don’t allow import of levels written by newer versions of Kodu.

- .kodu files are really just CAB archives with a different extension.

Hey, where's Patch 2?

mattmac — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Okay, this is annoying.

After uploading the patch for peer review, we found a pretty serious bug.

So we took it down, fixed the bug (go Steve!) and uploaded the patch again.

UH OH

Creator's club doesn't let you restart a peer review. You have to wait 7 days. Isn't that incredibly annoying? Apparently some folks were abusing the process by starting a few peer reviews in one day (a self-correcting problem, to my mind, as people aren't going to peer review for you if you keep restarting it.)

Anyway, victim of circumstances that we are, we had to "cool off" for 7 days before we could put the patch back into review.

Sorry folks! We don't like it either, but here we are. The XNA team has been such an incredible supporter for us we will forgive them this wrinkle.

Good news: 7 days is up today, and the patch is re-entering peer review.

Better news: you should see patch 3 :) We're calling it the "kodux" patch. (not really, but I just did, so I guess we are :))

Patch 2 Contents

mattmac — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

If you're an XNA dev, please help us move the patch through peer review by downloading and reviewing the build.

Hey, XNA Game Studio developers, we need your help vetting Kodu patch 2 for live consumption.

You can download the ccGame to playtest patch 2 here: http://catalog.xna.com/en-US/GameDetails.aspx?catalogEntryId=243e5e77-616c-48a9-9f34-78efb36e7945&type=1

(must login with your XNA Creators Club membership)

Here's a mostly complete list of the more interesting changes:

- Scalable characters!
- Show scores in say bubbles. You can now add <score red> in your character's say text and it will be replaced with the current red score.
- Fixed blending of cardinal direction movement. "move north west" would move north, but not west.
- Fixed invulnerable setting.
- Fix for object spawn height.
- Improvements to level download times in sharing session.
- In well-known sharing sessions, only share with host.
- Lots of tweaks and little improvements to the physics system.
- Limit path node altitude.
- Added character emissivity based on glow state.
- Added creatable tree programming tile.
- Made say bubble visible in first-person.
- Made health bar visible in first-person.
- First person camera less twitchy.
- Lots of gameplay adjustments to built-in levels.
- Show the number of people in a sharing session.
- Fixed false vision through walls.
- New built-in level: Tedanoo.

I Didn't Know You Could Do This in Kodu

mattmac — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Tavishhill2003 is one of the acknowledged masters of Kodu set building. He has completely outdone himself. I pulled these screens from a fantastic new video up on the 'tube. Recommend you go see it there because there is some beautiful dynamic lighting and shakycam work. Out. Stand. Ing.

Honestly, we're still trying to figure out how he pulled some of this stuff off. Video link at bottom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXfovBy1LTA

Great Kodu Tutorial

mattmac — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

If you're looking for a in-depth, full-service introduction to how world creation and programming work in Kodu, I've got a good one for you:

http://crackedrabbitgaming.com/2009/08/19/kodu-game-lab-full-game-video-tutorial-with-narration-generic-wars/

Covers creating terrain, adding objects, and building a small geometry-wars type battle game.

Cracked rabbit also has another very cool, more specific tutorial (they are doing a great job with these - thanks guys!)

http://crackedrabbitgaming.com/2009/08/19/kodu-game-lab-video-tutorials-3-keys-popcorn-popper/

Scaleable Characters and Objects

mattmac — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Next patch will let you scale all kinds of things in the world. Mark's been cranking this out and making sure that it works well with physics and the like.

Tiny motorcyles are really, really cute :)

This patch will probably land in early September - it won't be as big as the last patch but we hope to have a few small surprises in there for you.

UPDATE: Scaling for this version is something you do while editing. You can't control scale through Kode. Yet.

Kodu Videos on Youtube

mattmac — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Hi folks, just back from vacation and travel. Pardon my pause.

I've finally got my first "kodu gallery" video ready to post, but I've found a lot of cool kodu videos already existing. Always one to let the community lead the way, here's some pointers to some of the cooler stuff out there.

Kodu Missile Defense

This one walks all over a simpler clone I've been cobbling up. I'm happy to be crushed by Kodu users:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu5YwASl7NQ

Kodu Portal Tribute

Woah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6jGKXIIhQ

Kodu Space Dungeons

Man, this thing is huge. It goes on and on. Well done! Note that there's a newer one being shared around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlNVj5892nc

Cliffside Racer

Very snappy frantic dash down a narrow mountain path. Lots of enemies, great dynamics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpJTBMe1I98

Keep up the awesome work, people! You're what keeps us going.

Kodu Patch 1 is Live!

eanders — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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

Kodu patch 1 has entered peer review

mattmac — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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