XNA 2.0 && Silicon Minds

Well its that time again. XNA 2.0 has been released and with it a new Dream Build Play competition.

As a warm up to the competition Microsoft have launched a smaller contest named Silicon Minds. The central idea behind this contest is to encourage A.I. in games and as such 60% of the marks will be given to the quality of the AI in the game a further 20% given to how fun the game is and a final 20% given to the polish of the game.

I have been wracking my brain trying to think of a good project to do for this contest, some of the ideas i came up with were:

• Bee Swarm Game


• Dynamic FPS Difficulty


• Particle Flocking


• Learning Geometry Wars


• Predictive Multiplayer


• Adaptive Level Design


• DNA Designer


• Design a Positronic Brain

In the end i decided that due to how short the competition is (ends jan 27th) and my lack of any A.I. experience I would stick with what I have learnt in the past and develop on that. So using the work i have done on LieroXNA so far im planning on writing an A.I. for a deformable 2d landscape.

Sorry i cant say any more at this stage but stay tuned and ill update in the near future.

Project Technology (Deformable Terrains)

Well i got asked a question in a comment on how the terrains work in the LieroXNA project so I thought i would do a quick post on this rather than reply in the comments.

The way the terrains work has changed a few times over the course of development of the project for various reasons mostly related to the incompatabilities of the 360 and my previous methods. I wont go into those previous methods here but if anyone reading this has any questions dont hesitate to ask in a comment or email me. I would also like to say this may not be the most efficient method as I was only getting the terrains up as a proof of concept first then was planning on refining later.