This past week I have spent a little bit of time playing with the Kinect SDK and trying to get to grips with how it all works. My biggest interest is to use the Kinect SDK along with Microsoft’s XNA Framework for games development so I made a sample project using these technologies. I’ve posted a link to this project at the end of the article.
In this article I’m sharing a couple of quick extension methods I made for working with the Kinect SDK Beta. I was experimenting with using the Kinect sensor in an XNA project and found myself wanting to do two things; convert the output from the RGB stream to a Texture2D and to get the position of a joint from the sensors skeleton tracking functionality relative to the game screen dimensions.
I like to experiment a lot with XNA to try and find ways of doing things which I haven’t tried before. Recently I have been doing some reading around the .NET Reactive Extensions and thought that it might be pretty useful to use something like that in an XNA game. I played around with it a little bit and thought it was a little bit too “heavy” for what I wanted to do since it seems like I would need to define my observers as well as my observables. I was really looking for something that only required me to define my observable properties and subscribe to them using delegates without my other game engine classes needing to know anything about them. By removing the knowledge of observers and observables from the other game engine classes it leaves the choice of whether or not to use a subscription-based approach open.
On Wednesday and Thursday I was down at Microsoft Ireland in Dublin for the Imagine Cup Irish finals with the team I was mentoring from the University of Ulster Coleraine. Unfortunately we didn’t make it into the top 5 but it was great for our team of first year students to get down and experience the whole event.
I left Microsoft on Thursday really impressed with the quality of the projects at the competition this year. I really feel like the projects were a step up from the previous year and it was great to see so many people making use of Kinect and Windows Phone 7. Big congratulations to Team HERMES from IT Sligo who came first and will go on to represent Ireland at the Imagine Cup world finals in New York.
For my final year project at university I’ve been doing a bit of work with Windows Phone 7 and naturally that has involved working with gestures a bit. I think the gesture support in XNA 4 is great but I found myself writing the same code over and over again to handle them. So I decided to make a GestureHelper class which would take care of a lot of the repetitive work for me. I’ve attached a sample project containing my gesture helper and a couple of examples of using it.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of XNA work which involves loading XML files via the content pipeline and I frequently found myself wanting to do more with the IntermediateSerializer than the basics. I did a bit of a search and came up with the following blog article by Shawn Hargreaves that has helped me out loads:
For anyone working with XML and the content pipeline in XNA I strongly recommend taking a read through it!
For an assignment at university I have created a small demo project in XNA which makes use of a PhysX .NET wrapper project which can be found here. The demo features a height field actor, revolute joints, breakable fixed joints, convex meshes, force fields and collision callbacks. I’m currently thinking about writing some basic tutorials for PhysX and XNA but this will be at some point in the future as I’m fairly short on time at the minute.
Check out the video after the break.
I thought that I would take some time to write up a quick article about using linear interpolation to smoothly transition between two values in XNA. When I first found out how to do this it made a huge difference to the projects I work on. Some examples of when I use this are for time based colour cycling and gradually modifying alpha values to fade out a texture over a defined period. In general, I find that it is a simple method of adding some extra polish to any game.
A few weeks ago I spent some time upgrading my MicroStar Particle System from XNA 3.1 to XNA 4. For the most part this process went smoothly; there were quite a few changes to be made all over the place. However once I had cleared up all the build errors and ran the sample project I saw that my code for fading out particles when drawing them via my SpriteBatch instance was obviously not working.
This year I’m mentoring a team at my university in the Imagine Cup; I don’t have the time to actually compete so this is a great way for me to stay involved with it. On 04/03/2011 we received an email from Microsoft Ireland informing us that the team got through to the Irish Finals to compete for the opportunity to represent Ireland in the global competition.
This was great news and I’m really excited for the team to have the opportunity to experience this as it’s a great chance for them to learn loads and develop new skills in the technologies they are using to develop their application. There’s a lot of work to be done but I’m sure they can manage it! Best of luck to them at the Irish Finals!