The last few weeks I’ve been busy at work trying to finish a project that has been in progress well over a year.  It’s a Level 4 IMI project, fully interactive simulation, where the user must learn to operate a military vehicle and communicate with his crew. This was our first Level 4 project, so it caught us off guard with it complexity, however the finish results are incredible.  With any project, planning is a must, otherwise it will take twice as long to complete and this was the case with this project. The good thing is I did learned how to work more efficiently through planning and the advantages of using XML.

When I returned to my plan for the Nelxon XNA Game Engine Level Designer, I initially decided to develop an interface with Winforms to emulate Autodesk Maya navigation controls to layout my level and design stages but then it dawn on me. Why not just use Maya as the Level Designer then create a Maya plug-in to manage the 3D assets and create XML to layout the scene in XNA. In theory, The Game would read the xml file and dynamically load the level attributes and position assets.

If done correctly, I can create reusable assets to reduce file size and create controls for the assets in XNA.  I will show the results in the next few weeks, probably after the completion of the Level 4 project at work.  I have to plan out how this is going work…

…more to come.