So for my first semi-biggish project, I started a breakout clone with XNA. Still no collision detection, settings, good texture, etc... I used a tutorial to get the basic blocks and paddle and ball up, and am planning on doing everything else myself.

1. How would you draw a tiled background texture, and then draw the other textures over that.

2. When I run it in full screen there is a border to the right. Everything still works, but it looks bad.


3. When the player's lives (as seen above) reaches 0, how do you either clear the screen and give a

"Would you like to play again Y/N" message OR do a
And yes, I am using XNA GPA's v4 tutorial...

1.a. Drawing a tiled background basically involves using a for-loop to draw an image several times in different places, making a "single" image. There are lots of tutorials on tiling (including a couple here on the Wiki), so I won't go into that too much here.

1.b. You can draw your background first, and after that draw everything that should appear above, and that's all it takes. If that doesn't work for some reason, make sure you're drawing everything in the correct Z Order (see the MSDN for more details on drawing sprites with Z ordering).

2. This is most likely due to your window having a different resolution/aspect-ratio from your screen. One approach to the issue would be to draw borders around the play area, and make sure that the play area itself is always centered on the screen. Another would be to make sure that windowed mode and fullscreen mode use compatible aspect ratios.

3. One way to do this would simply be to draw something that covers the screen (a solid color, or maybe even a tiled background), and then use text to display your message. Then you can draw two "buttons" (either with code or with actual images) that the user can click on to decide what to do. Simply check for the mouse's position to see which button (if any) it is over on a click.

If you need any more help or explanation on anything, let us know!

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Hi.

I recently was looking around for a 'how do i make a tiled background' for my own game, I thought there might have been some XNA command to do it.. i couldn't find any satisfactory answer, so I ended up just calling the Spritebatch.Draw method a few times. I dont like doing it that way, but what can ya do?

My texture is 600x600, so I did this.

SpriteBatch.Draw(myTexture, 0,0, blah blah blah)
SpriteBatch.Draw(myTexture, 600, 0, blah blah)
SpriteBatch.Draw(myTexture, 1200, 0, blah blah)

etc etc.

I suppose I couldve added a loop with some math to do this automatically, but whatever. I didn't. lol.

What I'm looking for now is how to do *scrolling* backgrounds. It's one of those things that my current engine could do manually, but I'm looking for a more elegant way to do it.

Anyway. Just my 0.02.

-Jimbo

Yay im logged in.

To answer the other question, about layering, the SpriteBatch.Draw method has a "Layer Depth" parameter, which takes a float value. The *HIGHER* you set that float value, the LOWER, or DEEPER that texture will be drawn. For example, 0.0 is the "top" layer. So, a car drawn at layer depth 0.5 will be drawn ON TOP of grass with a layer depth of 0.6.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
"Hope is the first step on the road to dissapointment." -Jonah Orion
http://tankzgame.blogspot.com

Long time no see, Jimbo! (This is theraje, if you remember me from way back when.)



Lucky hasn't been around much at all since the site started to take off. In fact, GPWiki.org is now under new management as of earlier this year -- Codehead is running things now.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

that sucks. That guy was game programming knowledge in a can.

Without his pro-written VB-Game tutorials, I probably would've given up programming a long time ago.

I'm still a programming newb, but I've come a long way.. thanks in no small part to this very site and the people who post here.

_________________
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
"Hope is the first step on the road to dissapointment." -Jonah Orion
http://tankzgame.blogspot.com

Erm... Clarification on the second question please. How would I adjust the aspect ration or do whatever to make the two compatible. (BTW I got the tiled thingy sorted out, thanks...)

Off Topic: Also, how much more difficult is it to make Isometric games with XNA. I know there's more graphic work, but is there necessarily more coding?

Not really. There's a bit more work in calculating where to draw things, but overall drawing graphics is drawing graphics.

Can you post the code that you're using to set up full screen mode?

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Microsoft XNA MVP

The aspect ratio is the difference between the width and height of your window or screen. Most likely, you're using a 4:3 ratio for the width:height of your game surface, while your screen has a native resolution that is 16:9 or 16:10 (both of which are considered widescreen).

The easiest way to fix the problem would be to draw the game as you already are, but center the play area (take the screen width, subtract the play-area width from that, and then halve the result) and draw some sort of border in the 'empty' space.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Seems to me the SCREENWIDTH/SCREENHEIGHT is inconsistent with how many blocks you've drawn, vs the size of the blocks.

If the screenwidth/back buffer width. are set to a size that isn't a multiple of the width of your blocks, then it wont work properly.

Example: 800x600... thats 800 x 600 pixels. 800 wide.

Youve got 10 blocks. So if you made the block sprite 80 pixels wide, it'd work fine. and so on.

Okay, weird brick problem solved, paddle collision detection math added, game state stuff almost done, music and sound operational.
The problem with that brick thing was that I was using NO code to set up anything. Just using the brick texture width as a guideline, not the screen size.

So how would you use a SortedList to access a file, retrieve high scores, SAVE highscores, and post them to the main menu?
Also, just so I know how I'm doing, how long would it take you guys to, from scratch, make a breakout clone?

I could probably have one done in about an hour. I've been doing this for a good while though, so that's probably not typical.



You wouldn't use a sorted list. You might look at this and the links at the bottom of that page.

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I know mostly how the StreamReader and StreamWriter stuff works. (I made a replacement for notepad in a couple of days)
What I mean is what is the best way to do the saving and loading of highscores? I was thinking a sorted collection class with a loop to access 10 high score fields, but I don't really know how to do that.

You might take a look at this.

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Also, how to add animations (explosion when ball goes off the screen), and how to make a fade-to-black if the player dies?
Small words please.

Machaira: AN HOUR!
Then what about a fully configurable breakout clone, with sound, music, menus, special bricks, highscores and a level editor?

Oh, only that? In that case, it would take him half an hour

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Join Glorious Trainwrecks, and enter competitions to make games from scratch (using no preexisting code) in 2 hours..
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/forum

Join 0hgame jam and enter competitions to make games from scratch (no preexisting code) in 0 hours..
http://0hgame.eu/

I enjoy taking part in these things, and I can be quite productive under such pressure.

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heh, nah, it would take about a day. 10 hours maybe to make it really good.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

OK, good, I've only been working on this for 10 hrs total (schools keeping me busy enough), and I'm about 1/3 of the way done. I only get to code for 2-4 hours a day.

So animations in XNA? Tutorials, code samples?

What kind of animations do you need for a Breakout clone?

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Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP