Feature Showcase: Xena Development Speed Test

Soooo I've decided to showcase another screenshot developed entirely from the XENA Engine.

I decided to test how quickly I could set up a basic game UI in the engine. The test results showed that It took me approximately 15 minutes and 23 lines of code to set up the "Xena Test Game", This included fetching a background from www.fg-a.com , constructors for three UIButton controls (with properties a plenty/and function like command buttons in visual studio) , wiring the in-built click event to the 'Exit' button to close the game when clicked, and the inclusion of an animated mouse icon.

The result of these 23 lines of code was:

Ok so the graphics might not be fantastic, but this was a speed test... The only graphics i had to get was the background, since the fonts were created by the Xena XGate Text Generator, and the images were the standard XENA In built control textures...

The funny part is... It's taking almost the same amount of lines to write this blog, as it took me to render that UI... think about that ;)

Feature Showcase: UI Controls - UITextbox

Here is a demonstration of the engine at work...

Instead of having to go through the mundane tasks of creating your own UI Controls, the xena engine comes with 15 pre-created controls, this is just one of them... The UITextbox control

To create a UITextbox control simply create an instance of the UITextbox object as shown below:

Once an appropriate constructor has been used (I used the default Xena constructor), add it to the control dashboard, build and Voila as simple as that!

The textbox also comes with a large variety of tweaks in the form of properties, some of which are shown below:

I know some of the graphics might be tough to view, but the blog is quite destructive with regard to images, so in order to see the image properly, simply click on it...

It may be of concern to some that it looks like you have to use that simple textbox texture and colour, however, this is not the case... all controls come with a default constructor, and a customising set of constructors... In using the xena default constructor there is no need to set which textures you want to display, the engine displays the default Xena texture. In the customising texture, you specify exactly what you want to show, where.

Hope you enjoy the showcase :)

Xena Engine to include SQL Server support

In light of SQL Server express edition being free and easily available, there has been a design decision to include SQL Server support within the engine.

Instead of the game developers being restricted to encrypted files on the users hard drive, game developers will also be able to create and store encrypted data into custom built SQL Databases.

We will have more information later with respect to this...