XML

Currently, I’m sitting on a plane leaving for Amsterdam. So yes, I’m on holidays!

Internet connectivity might be limited during the next two weeks until August 8 – depending on the availability of free WiFi. All your pending requests and mail will be dealt with after my return, promised.

But then again, you might be in for some new flickr pictures afterwards … ;)

One future I see for our little company? Definitely something like this:

A StarWars game called FleetCommander, played on a 8160 by 2304 pixel wide touch screen.

Well, let me correct that. A touch wall.

It’s sometimes funny what you manage to dig up when trying to archive your projects. There are always some projects that you started for some people out of an act of kindness, and, since they have been pet projects for everyone involved, died a slow and painful death, languishing in your projects folder, untouched and unloved.

What remains are the stories that come with those projects. Sometimes, they are better than the projects themselves.

Okay … normally, April Fool’s jokes are somewhat lame, and I have a tendency not to repost them. But this one … this one is pretty cool.

Since I happen to be ranked somewhat high when it comes to mentioning Unity 3D and XML, and some of the posts¹ happen to be outdated by now since I learned stuff². But most of all, I intend to learn even more.

That’s why I choose to release those two projects into the wild and publish them on github.

Or: How Much Are We Letting Reality Getting Into the Way When Designing Games?

Yes, by now Robert Yang’s article about the gay plot in Dragon Age has made the rounds elsewhere, but I think the issue is important enough to warrant publishing it here as well.

So, Robert Yang mods Dragon Age so his male character can play out the romance plot with another male character, Alistair – something, which only can be done by modding the game, even though the dialogue is surprisingly gender neutral. All is perfect, until …

Since I already played around with XML in C#, this part of the project was easier to do than before.

What is it supposed to do?

Basically, I could simply hard-code most of my strings used in the game directly into the code – no one would notice the difference anyway. But obviously, this is not a very good idea, both because editing strings and later translating them becomes a pain.

Creating some data that would allow me to get strings out of an XML file would solve this problem – and, if the code is good enough, be reusable in later games.

It would allow me to edit text independently of the game code and add translations on a later date.

Since I want to make some basic statistics for my game at Fantoche, I needed some basic logging function of the player’s position.