Shyam Guthikonda

I just discovered the Virtual CD Control Tool from Microsoft. It is a free tool that can be downloaded from the Microsoft webpage.

It is not a pretty application, but by following the README, you can easily mount an iso image without physically burning a CD.

System Requirements
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- Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional

Installation instructions
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1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click “Driver control”
4. If the “Install Driver” button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click “Start”
6. Click OK
7. Click “Add Drive” to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click “Add Drive” until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click “Mount”.
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click “OK”. UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

The DebugOverlay utility is a class that I’ve been using in my XNA projects for a while. It allows me to draw visualization objects from anywhere in my application – even in separate threads.

Some areas where I have used this utility are:

• The AI system can display a units’ velocity and position through Lines, Arrows, and Spheres. Use ScreenText to show the current state or goal hierarchy of a given unit.
• The Physics system can use bounding boxes and spheres to show collision volumes. Points can be used to show raycast intersections or points of impact.
• The Graphics system can use Spheres, Lines, and Arrows to show the position and direction of lights.
• The Editor (or other tools) can use Lines, Arrows, and Bounding Boxes for axis representation during translate/rotate/scale.
• Vertex Display – For a software-based skinning implementation, I used Points to visualize the locations of my vertices, and Spheres for the locations of the bones. It’s possible to use Spheres for everything, but thousands of Spheres can get a little expensive.

This utility is only meant for Debug purposes, and therefore uses the [Conditional("DEBUG")] tag on each of it’s exposed methods.

To use the DebugOverlay, create the object during Initialization:

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new DebugOverlay(GraphicsDevice, Content);

Call the visualization functions from anywhere in your code:

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void ScreenText(string text, Vector2 pos, Color c)
void Line(Vector3 start, Vector3 end, Color color)
void Arrow(Vector3 start, Vector3 end, float arrowSize, Color color)
void BoundingBox(BoundingBox boundingBox, Color color)
void Point(Vector3 pos, Color color)
void Sphere(Vector3 pos, float radius, Color color)

In your Draw routine, call the DebugOverlay.Draw method, passing in the projection and view matrices:

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DebugOverlay.Singleton.Draw(mCamera.ProjectionMatrix, mCamera.ViewMatrix);

I made a small sample application to show off the functionality. Below is a screenshot and the complete source code.

Download: source + demo

I learned of a new program today, called FreeMind. FreeMind is a cross-platform, open source, mind-mapping application. It looks like a great tool for both brainstorming and conceptually solidifying ideas. It also can be used as a convincing presentation tool, visually showing the flow of data and information to the audience.

During the first semester of working on NitroX and Artemis Chronicle, our design and content pipeline was very slow. Simple things like creating a level and placing a box were arduous tasks. Placing an item involved flying the camera around the level, writing down it’s rough coordinates, hard coding the coordinates, and then tweak these values until the box is in the desired position. (Thankfully, we were using C# which pretty much eliminated any compile time. Doing this in C++ would have been impossible).

This created a situation where we were unable to prototype levels quickly, and time that could be better used somewhere else was being wasted.

Because of this, I devoted the first few weeks of the second semester to full-time tool development. Two of the more useful tools created are described below. These tools, once created, were continuously used and refined throughout the entire life of the project.

Level Editor:

Artemis Chronicle and the NitroX engine have a completely integrated level editor. The editor allows 3D navigation through the world (using Maya camera controls), object placement (translation, rotation, scale), object property exposure (including physics volumes), trigger volumes (used for scripted events), and interactive camera sequencing (allows us to create cut-scenes and cinematics in a point-and-click fashion instead of in code).

The editor runs on Windows and is written in C#, allowing for close integration into the XNA content pipeline. The editor data is serialized out to an XML format (which is later compressed for application deployment), sent through the content pipeline, and imported directly into the NitroX engine for use on both Windows and Xbox 360.

Mesh Viewer:

The Mesh Viewer is a tool that lets our artists quickly preview their work before sending it off to be integrated into the latest build of the game. As anyone who’s used the FBX exporter knows, exporting from Maya does not always go smoothly, so this tool allows the artist to catch any errors early, thus saving time for the entire team.

Animations can be chained together to create sequences, and then previewed in a real-time manner. Playback speed, blending parameters, and looping can also be adjusted via the user interface.

Recently I’ve begun searching for apartments in Tokyo for a tentative move. In Japan, the tatami mat is widely used as the unit of measurement for apartments and other living quarters. From a Western perspective, it can be a little hard to grasp exactly what “15 tatami mats” is. Below is a little converter application that I wrote, to aid me in my search for real estate

* Tatami mat sizes vary slightly by region. Edoma (江戸間), in the Tokyo region, are around 176 x 88cm. Kyoma (京間), in the Kyoto region, are around 191 x 95.5cm. For more information, see Wikipedia.

You can download the properly formatted source code here.

This is an in-game World of Warcraft calculator, similar to the standard Windows calculator. It was written with XML and Lua.

Download: source

It is an in-game World of Warcraft dictionary, with definitions of commonly used terms and acronyms. There is a GUI component, as well as useful console commands for quick-lookups. Written with XML and Lua.

Download: source

An electronic recipe organizer written in Python. Search, sort, print, and organize your recipes, as well as many other useful features. wxPython is used for the interface, and PySqlite for the database backend. Windows/Mac OS X supported.

E-Cookbook is an electronic cookbook or recipe organizer. It will replace the old tattered cookbook in your kitchen. Easily decide on something to make for dinner, or see what you can make based on the ingredients in your refrigerator.

Please see the SourceForge project page for the latest download.

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for writing Java Bytecode programs, using C++ and wxWidgets. Some features:

• Full-featured text editor with tab support.
• Assembler to translate bytecode into instruction-level code.
• Multi-threaded debugging, with support for breakpoints and line-by-line debugging.

Download: bin