The goings on as of late
October 31st, 2006 by proj
I’ve found a little time here and there for more XNA coding. I cleaned up a lot of the UI code, there are a number of nice usable components now, Menu, ListBox and Tweaker. Menus can be added to the UI and show up at the top of Window when doing stuff in the editors. ListBoxes are used for most of the UI and support scrolling, moving items up and down, inserting, adding etc. Tweaker is just a name I used for a generic control that can be bound to certain types of objects, takes 360 controller input and tweaks the value.
I got my laptop back from Dell and it’s in worse shape than it was before. It still emits static sound from the speaker and now it crashes when I run 3d applications on it. They replaced the video card and speakers this time and maybe did a minimum of testing before sending it off. I’m going to have to send it back again.
At work we have a bit of downtime so I’m putting the finishing touches on a distributed networking layer that hopefully will become the basis of a lot of new tools and infrastructure.
Tuesday Children of Mana will be out so I feel obligated to pick that up. Apparently from what I’ve read it lacks some of the overarching story that made Secret of Mana so good but it makes up for it with some additions to the action aspect of the game. I’ve been playing through Dragon Quest Heroes, Nanostray and Meteos. I finally broke down and bought Meteos, it’s really a great value now at $20. I think Meteos in a lot of ways is much better than Lumines but you can easily see the similarities between them. The puzzle action in Meteos is fast and fun and keeps me coming back for more.
I also saw that FFXII advertised for $38 at Best Buy and that is another must have. Too many great games coming out this holiday and the PS2 and DS together are delivering a ton of great games.
On the 360 front I have been playing the new Spinter Cell, Gears of War (co-op on hardcord is the way to go!), Doom, Lumines and N3 continues to take up some cycles.
I want to get a comment feed on the front of this page and pull in some of the side bar content I had on my old blog but for now I’ll settle for just posting 
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Hi-
I am a customer advocate at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. I ran across your blog post, and I would love to help you in any way I can.
There may be other options available other than sending your system back to the depot for the problems you’ve described. If you contact me, I’d would be happy to take ownership of your case and make sure this receives special attention.
I look forward to hearing from you!
John Dell Customer Advocate