It Works

Ok, so the old laptop I’m working with isn’t ideal, but it does work and does run Xna Game Studio. I’ll probably only being doing 2D stuff on it. I did look into getting a bit more ram for it though as it only has 512 right now and most of that is used up just by the OS and the minimal apps running in the background.

Working with Older Hardware

It looks like I’m going to be using an older laptop for some development when I’m riding on my train everyday. Only 512 MB or ram. Yikes.

Installing Visual Studio Express took like an hour and I’m installing Xna Game Studio right now to see if this is doable. This should be interesting.

Colors and Hex

I recently needed to write out Color(s) as an xml attribute. I wrote 2 methods to read and write the Color(s) as Hex strings. Here ya go:

namespace Snow.Xna.Graphics
{
public static class ColorHelper
{
private static char[] _hexDigits = {‘0′, ‘1′, ‘2′, ‘3′, ‘4′, ‘5′, ‘6′, ‘7′, ‘8′, ‘9′, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’};

public static string ToHexString(Color color)
{
byte[] bytes = new byte[4];

bytes[0] = color.A;
bytes[1] = color.R;
bytes[2] = color.G;
bytes[3] = color.B;

char[] chars = new char[8];

for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
int b = bytes[i];
chars[i * 2] = _hexDigits[b >> 4];
chars[i * 2 + 1] = _hexDigits[b & 0xF];
}

return new string(chars);
}

private static byte HexDigitToByte(char c)
{
switch(c)
{
case ‘0′: return (byte)0;
case ‘1′: return (byte)1;
case ‘2′: return (byte)2;
case ‘3′: return (byte)3;
case ‘4′: return (byte)4;
case ‘5′: return (byte)5;
case ‘6′: return (byte)6;
case ‘7′: return (byte)7;
case ‘8′: return (byte)8;
case ‘9′: return (byte)9;
case ‘A’: return (byte)10;
case ‘B’: return (byte)11;
case ‘C’: return (byte)12;
case ‘D’: return (byte)13;
case ‘E’: return (byte)14;
case ‘F’: return (byte)15;
}

return (byte)0;
}

public static Color FromHexString(string hex)
{
if( hex.Length != 8 )
return Color.Black;

int a = (HexDigitToByte(hex[0]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[1]);
int r = (HexDigitToByte(hex[2]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[3]);
int g = (HexDigitToByte(hex[4]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[5]);
int b = (HexDigitToByte(hex[6]) << 4) + HexDigitToByte(hex[7]);

return new Color((byte)r, (byte)g, (byte)b, (byte)a);
}
}
}

More Content Added

I added in some content from my other blog. Been wasting a lot of time lately with Forza2. I’m currently working on a tile map editor and I have some interesting things to say about Xna and WinForms in the future.

XNExtensions

Nick Gravelyn has released an open source set of C# extension methods for use with Xna. See the post here for more information.

http://www.nickontech.com/2008/12/new-open-source-project-time/

Hello world!

Hello all and welcome. This website is a blog about Xna. I’m a hobbyist Xna developer and there isn’t much here right now but I’ll adding as much as I can as soon as I can.