Text-to-speech

This is something I will have to implement for a realistic Tower simulator, the planes will have to talk to the user, and vice-versa. On the planes side, their calls are coming from text and will need to be transformed into voice. There are several text-to-speech egines out there, but I came upon one (NeoSpeech) that completely blew me away. It almost sounds like a human being, scary!

I'll be looking into this and other engines.

XNA in a WinForm

Following up on the thinking of a full 3D interface or a WInForm to run the program in, I bumped into this article. Very cool stuff, including WPF!

Interface thoughts

As I sit at EWR airport, on my way to LIT, the thought struck me if I should have a completely 3D interface or if the 3D stuff should run in a window inside a bigger WinForm.

Some of the pros/cons that come to mind are:

3D Interface

This to me is by far the more immersive environment, where you have the outside world as well as the inside of the tower all rendered in 3D. In this case, the user would have to "walk" around in the tower floor to go see different computer screens, to look at different areas of the airport, etc. This also means the input interface would have to be built a little more robust that with the other alternative being discussed here, which could extend the development time a bit, when coupled to actually building the inside of the tower and making it interactive.

WinForm

This would definitelly allow a faster development, as a lot of the information being displayed to the user (such as flight strips) could simply be done via buttons, list boxes, etc.

I am undecided right now and think will be for some time. A decision does not need to be made soon, as I am still coming to grips with XNA and game logic.

Let's keep thinking.

Cool tutorials

In my never-ending search for more information, I bumped into a couple of tutorial sites that are excellent for XNA. CampElmXNA has tutorials on both C# and XNA. Riemer has been known for his DirectX tutorials, and now has a very extensive series (substitute "a very extensive" for "60"!) of XNA tutorials. Nice job guys!

By the way, Riemer's explanation of what is XNA was a breath of fresh air. Perhaps for people involved with it for some time the following statement is obvious, but it took me some time before I figured this out:

Released in December 2006, XNA is intended to push the ease of game programming to the extreme. XNA is new wrapper around native DirectX. As development on a new version of Managed DirectX has been cancelled, XNA can be thought of as the new version of Managed DirectX.

Pre-Development Test

OK, I am pretty happy. I just created a runway (a plane in 3DS) and a tower cab (pretty simple, really, 18 polygons), and using the Grumman J2F, hooked a very simple (but important) pre-development test. I have some keyboard inputs controlling the direction the plane moves in, and the camera located inside the tower cab. The camera tracks the plane, and it looks pretty good. I know, it's a small step, but it's one that gives a lot back. It's very cool to see the plane moving, the camera tracking, I'm excited!

Next I start work on a preliminary, basic flight model.

Render Test

This is a render test I have just cooked up. It uses a free model I got from Turbo Squid of a Grumman J2F Duck. A very nice model with around 8800 polys. I did not use any shaders for multiple instances, just simply loaded each model as if it was different, and drew it, so there are no optimizations at all.

This was to see what kind of performance I got. With the 21 models you see here, fraps (which I used for measuring the frame rates and recording this video) shows I was still rendering at 60 fps. This is in a Dell XPS M1710 laptop (GeForce Go 7900 GTX). Not bad at all!

Google is not the only one that's good at maps

Check this out. ProFX and MaPZone seem to allow procedural texturing on the fly, so that you don't need the gigabytes of textures to ship with your game. More than that, MaPZone can make diffuse, specular, normal, and other maps all fit together effortlessly. Alright, I'm interested. Oh, and did I mention they are an XNA partner, so they have a special (read dumbbed down) version of MaPZone free. Did I mention I was interested?