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b0jangles
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« on: May 14, 2008, 06:57:45 PM »

So, I've made a chat-based competitive trivia game in XNA called Trivia War.

Here's a link:

Trivia War

I'd be interested to know what you think...

« Last Edit: May 14, 2008, 07:01:16 PM by b0jangles » Logged
Guert
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« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2008, 07:15:18 PM »

It would be a good idea to first introduce yourself a bit, then talk about what is this game of yours. So yeah, trivia, but about what? How does it work? How does it look inside?

Thanks!
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b0jangles
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« Reply #2 on: May 14, 2008, 07:21:11 PM »

It would be a good idea to first introduce yourself a bit, then talk about what is this game of yours. So yeah, trivia, but about what? How does it work? How does it look inside?

Thanks!

Okay, sorry about that. I'm a Chicago-based composer / sound designer. This is my first game written using XNA. You can learn a bit more about me on my bio page.

The Trivia is pretty general trivia. The game works much like an IRC trivia channel, though it uses sockets, not IRC. Any player can host their own server that others can connect to, and servers can be either public or private. There's currently one public server named "Trivia 1", but anybody can add their server to the list of public servers. Players can chat and rack up scores by correctly answering questions posed by a trivia bot. I think it's a fun game, but I guess I'm a bit biased  Wink

The game is written in C#, and there's about 7000 or so questions.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2008, 07:44:01 PM by b0jangles » Logged
Tom Quinn
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« Reply #3 on: May 14, 2008, 07:27:15 PM »

I'll try it out in a bit, but I'm going to be keeping my eye on this one. People are having serious trouble running my XNA game, so I'd like to see how people fare with this one.

Looks good, though.
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« Reply #4 on: May 14, 2008, 07:29:36 PM »

I cant get it to work. Every time I run the EXE in the folder, I get a fatal error.

EDIT: Disregard that. Apparently Ive never tried running an XNA game before.
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b0jangles
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« Reply #5 on: May 14, 2008, 07:35:43 PM »

I cant get it to work. Every time I run the EXE in the folder, I get a fatal error.

EDIT: Disregard that. Apparently Ive never tried running an XNA game before.

Yeah, XNA is kinda new. Supposedly they're going to eventually bundle it into the DirectX download, but right now you have to install the 2MB XNA framework. I've provided a link on my webpage to both the XNA library and a program that checks to make sure you have everything installed correctly. When you try it out, try joining the "Trivia 1" server.

Quote
People are having serious trouble running my XNA game, so I'd like to see how people fare with this one.

You might have them try the XNA Requirements Checker. It checks to make sure you have XNA, DirectX and .Net installed, and also checks some basic hardware requirements, like the correct version of pixel shaders...

Also, I've found that you do have to make sure to install .Net before DirectX, if you don't already have .Net. If you do it in the other order, the DirectX installer doesn't install the managed code portions of DirectX.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2008, 07:42:45 PM by b0jangles » Logged
Tom Quinn
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« Reply #6 on: May 14, 2008, 08:54:58 PM »

Yeah, XNA has quite a few requirements. It's about to get worse, too -- XNA 3.0's going to require .NET 3.5! The only people guaranteed to have 3.5 are people with Vista SP1, and that ain't many.

EDIT: That's a nifty utility, though. Thanks for mentioning it!
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CitadelBrian
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« Reply #7 on: May 14, 2008, 09:09:46 PM »

Well, the interface is pretty nice. I like the animations, almost Vista or OSX-like.

The game itself, though, kinda seems like a standalone IRC bot. Undecided Definitely keep working on it, as you have a stable, functioning base. I'd like to see what this grows into.
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b0jangles
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« Reply #8 on: May 15, 2008, 05:29:26 AM »

Well, the interface is pretty nice. I like the animations, almost Vista or OSX-like.

The game itself, though, kinda seems like a standalone IRC bot. Undecided Definitely keep working on it, as you have a stable, functioning base. I'd like to see what this grows into.

Thanks, CitadelBrian. It was definitely modeled after an IRC bot, so that's not surprising. I think IRC trivia bots are fun, but a lot of people find the many servers and such of IRC confusing. This was basically an attempt at bringing IRC trivia to the masses ;-). Anyway, how would you suggest improving it?

Thanks!
Tom
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« Reply #9 on: May 15, 2008, 08:32:41 AM »

Yeah, XNA has quite a few requirements. It's about to get worse, too -- XNA 3.0's going to require .NET 3.5! The only people guaranteed to have 3.5 are people with Vista SP1, and that ain't many.

EDIT: That's a nifty utility, though. Thanks for mentioning it!
Shocked I think that, unless, you want to develop for the 360 you should stay away from XNA, the requirements, at least for me, just seem like too much to bare. Sad

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b0jangles
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« Reply #10 on: May 15, 2008, 09:00:30 AM »

Yeah, XNA has quite a few requirements. It's about to get worse, too -- XNA 3.0's going to require .NET 3.5! The only people guaranteed to have 3.5 are people with Vista SP1, and that ain't many.

EDIT: That's a nifty utility, though. Thanks for mentioning it!
Shocked I think that, unless, you want to develop for the 360 you should stay away from XNA, the requirements, at least for me, just seem like too much to bare. Sad



Well, right now XNA requires .Net 2.0, DirectX, and XNA. I agree it's a bit of a pain to have 3 separate runtime requirements, but most people will have .Net 2.0 at this point. Any gamer will have DirectX, and XNA is only a 2MB download...It would be nice if Microsoft would just push .Net, DirectX, and XNA in their automatic updates, though ;-)

Tom
« Last Edit: May 15, 2008, 09:09:15 AM by b0jangles » Logged
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« Reply #11 on: May 15, 2008, 08:47:55 PM »

I decided to write a little bit about my experiences with XNA on my home page...

http://gersic.com/projects.php?id=41

Trivia War is a chat-based competitive multiplayer networked trivia game written using the Microsoft XNA framework. The game is based around the trivia games that are popular on many IRC servers. The idea here is to make an IRC Trivia type game that doesn't require the player to figure out how to navigate the many IRC servers and channels out there. IRC is great fun, but a lot of people find it intimidating. Anyway, the game doesn't use IRC, but the gameplay is similar.

This is the first game I've written using Microsoft XNA, and it was an interesting experience. XNA is basically an add-on to DirectX that streamlines a lot of the work of writing a game, and it allows you to develop games for Windows, XBox, and Zune. It's a new library, so Microsoft is releasing new versions fairly rapidly, but I found the development process to be remarkably stable...especially after spending the past few months working on a Google Android application. In Google's defense, of course, Android isn't a final product yet. XNA stands for XNA's Not Acronymed, by the way. Apparently they're attempting to appeal to anyone who still hasn't gotten their fill of ironic recursive acronyms, but I digress. This game is Windows-only, largely because of problems (both obvious and non-obvious) with text-chat on the XBox.

XNA is designed to take advantage of Xbox Live (and/or Windows Live), which opens up some interesting distribution options, but somewhat interestingly, if you use Windows/XBox Live to handle your game's networking, you aren't allowed to include text-based chat, because Windows Live encrypts all network communications, and international encrypted text-based chat is actually illegal under the US Patriot Act. Consequently, the XNA license agreement expressly forbids Windows Live or XBox Live text chat. Seriously. I'm not making that up. Some people might suggest that Microsoft should just include a mechanism for sending non-encrypted text messages across the network, but I guess they haven't gotten to that yet.

Thankfully, it's still possible to use XNA as a game framework, but do the networking code yourself, so that's what I've done here. Players can either join an existing trivia server or host their own, much like what is done in many First Person Shooter games. This obviously has the handy benefit of distributing the server workload away from my own systems. The networking communication between client and server is accomplished through the .Net System.Net library, and the public servers list is maintained on the hotlidsallsizes.com web server. Trivia servers ping PHP scripts on the web server every so often to tell it that they're still alive. This method seems to work pretty well. Trivia War is written in C#.

One unfortunate thing that I've found regarding XNA is that it requires the player to install three separate runtime frameworks. .Net 2.0 SP1, DirectX 9, and XNA 2.0. Somewhat annoyingly, they actually have to be installed in that order, as well. Most people have .Net by now, so that's not too big a deal. Any gamer will have DirectX, and XNA is only a 2MB download, so on paper, it looks like not too big a deal, but if, for instance, you installed DirectX before you installed .Net, the managed code portions of DirectX won't be installed, so Managed DirectX games won't work, and neither will XNA. Supposedly Microsoft will eventually be bundling XNA into DirectX, but for the moment, three runtime requirements is a bit annoying.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2008, 08:54:36 PM by b0jangles » Logged
CitadelBrian
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« Reply #12 on: May 16, 2008, 12:00:38 AM »

Anyway, how would you suggest improving it?

I'd suggest turning it into more of a competitive game. You know, have different sections for different subjects, have 1v1 battles, etc. Extending the interface to have more customization would be good too - like the character creator in FreQuency.
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