Just want to say happy new year to all those reading. It has been a great year for myself, I finished up my final year of school and will be starting university next year.

I have a couple of things planned for the new year, now that I have time to work exclusively on programming items. I have an idea for an XNA tool I want to implement that can make things easier, especially with file size restrictions. I also have a project that I need to get started on, also XNA related, but more on that should appear in the new year.

In any case, I hope you all have a good new year, and that we continue to progress. For those still awaiting midnight, don't party too hard. ;)

I just finished up my sample for the 2.0 version of the Post Processor (see first post on this blog) for XNA2.

The sample was built in XNA Game Studio 2.0 on Visual Studio 2005 Pro, and should compile fine in that. To use it just follow the instructions in Usage.txt, which explains how to use the program and also that there are more than enough comments in the code to understand its workings.

If you have any questions, you can use the contact link at the top right, and get me via that, or you can contact me via the forums at www.thehazymind.com/smf, probably best via PM there though, since its not my board. Of course you can also leave comments here. :)

Link:

PostProc2Sample.zip [28kb] (Requires XNA 2.0 and either VS2005 or C# Express Edition 2005 installed, with XNA GSE 2.0 installed over that. - The archive only contains source code to minimize filesize, if you need a binary I will upload that.)

The software I use for this blog got a minor version update today, from 1.2 to 1.3, pretty fast for about 2 1/2 months of work, and a good list of new features and changes. I have taken the time to upgraded to 1.3, must have done something wrong since there were issues with roles and users not transferring right, but that is stuff you don't need to worry about.

This software is a great piece of blogging software written in asp.net 2.0, and with plenty of features being added all the time, as well as a reasonably stable codebase that can be pulled from the CodePlex repository for it.

I am almost done with a basic sample for my Post Processing class, I just need to finish the shader and add some more comments, then pack it up. It should be up here shortly, then I will drop it into my HMEngine branch and work on implementing it in that project as well. So far it is pretty powerful, I just need a nice little usage guide to explain how to put it to use properly, that will come with the sample.

I decided to start up and try and complete a project I had put on the backburner about a month ago for myself, which pretty much involved downloading the content of a webpage for offline viewing and storing it in a database. I also took this time to get into WPF and further my explorations into LINQ.

Those aspects were easy (WPF is damn nice, and LINQ makes database access soo intuitive and easy) however when it came to parsing the HTML, another problem arose. I headed back to my old faithful tool for .Net2 called HtmlAgilityPack. Now this tool I have used before, and it has been great, taking even malformed HTML and turning it into XML for use in applications.

However this is where the issue arose, the nature of the website and content required me to parse a selection box on the page to grab every chapter of the content, so that I could download the rest in the background, and also so that the program knows what to download. Now since the site is not XHTML compliant, it could get away with not placing an ending tag to correspond with each <option> tag. Seems the HtmlAgiltyPack also doesn't do this right at all, and now I am stuck with finding something to do it, at least fix it, or I might have to revert to writing up a custom rewriter with that for Regex. (euurgh - tedious)

On the XNA front, I intend to get that sample done really soon, just thinking of something to make it interesting, and then I might have some more things I can get cranked out over these holidays.

Again with the new blogs, but anyway, phpBB is too big for just blogging, since this is a personal blog there isn't any reason to have a full forum behind it.

So thanks to the BlogEngine.net people, I have a nice little blog to put my stuff with all the features, and in .Net as well. :)

So basically my plans for my time during the holidays now is to create a sample for my ported Post Processor for XNA2.0 (See file dump below for 1.0Refresh version), and also get that integrated into the Hazy Mind engine, with a new tutorial for that.

After that, work on some projects I have been slowly making my way through, they may/may not appear on here, and also get around to learning the graphical content creation aspects of game development, so that I can get content for my XNA games done.

So basically this blog will contain not only XNA and programming related stuff, but also my own personal items, gaming related etc, if you want to focus, there are categories for that.   ;)

In other news, Nemo Krad released his XNA game Breakthrough for both Windows and the Xbox360, this is a new take on the old Breakout/Arkanoid classic, but in 3D, so the ball can move in X,Y and Z, and there are powerups etc, and some nice shader effects. Check it out over at http://darkomengames.co.uk and give it a try.

Now for the file dump, this is basically all the files I uploaded for my old blog (not much) that people might still want to grab, since I do not want to go and recreate the old posts for them.

Post Processor (1.0 Refresh)

and thats about it, the screenshots from Halo 3 I see no point in putting back up.

So subscribe to the RSS feed and there should be more up here soon.