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A while ago we discussed in the Forum how to use the Microsoft Kinect SDK to animate a character model in real-time and how to apply movement constraints (e.g. joint rotation limits). Yesterday our company got a new Kinect device and I figured I might spend the rest of the afternoon trying to write a small XNA sample.

Here is the result: (You can download the source code below the video.)

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Here are few thoughts about 2011, the coming year and one uncommented video…

It is time to make the game menu built in the previous two blog posts (Part 1, Part 2) more dynamic. Currently all screens are static. When another game screen is opened the change is instant – there is no transition phase between screens.

This is what we want to achieve:



The DigitalRune Animation library provides an animation system for animating objects. In Part 1 and Part 2 the animation system has already been set up and is ready to be used.

Animations...

This is the second part of the step-by-step tutorial for building a simple game menu in XNA. Previously we have set up the project, the game loop, and added the UI theme. Now it’s time to implement the game logic…

The latest release of the DigitalRune Engine contains a new sample called GameStatesSample which covers a some of the basics:

• How to set up the game loop.
• How to define a theme for rendering the user-interface.
• How to create a game menu which can be controlled via gamepad, mouse, and keyboard.
• How to manage different game screens using a state machine.
• How to transition between screens using animations.

The result is a stripped down XNA application – no fancy graphics, no gameplay, just a few screens and menus. Take a look:

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In the last months we have received a few requests about Mono support for our DigitalRune Engine libraries. I have spent some time to get familiar with Mono, and to see what implications Mono support would have.

About Mono

If you are not familiar with Mono: Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. It makes the .NET framework available under Linux and Mac OS X. …

This article is a step-by-step description of my first attempt to create a tree view control. I spent less than 4 hours of work on the control and this was the result:

In this article I will explain the development steps, as well as my thought process. At the end of the article you can download the source code.

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This time we take a look at how the DigitalRune Game UI library handles input.

Overview

Here is a class diagram showing only the types and type members related to input processing:

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While we discussed the GUI rendering process in the last article, we left out any details about the default UI renderer. if you plan to create custom controls, you will want to extend the standard renderer, and this blog post will hopefully provide the missing explanations.

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In the last article about the DigitalRune Game UI we examined how the size and position of a GUI control is determined. Yet we have not discussed where and how the controls are drawn to the screen. This the topic of this article. – This will be another rather dry article, but we are trying to get a lot of information and knowledge across for those who want to extend or learn from our DigitalRune Game UI library. So let’s jump right in…