Hurricane in my Area

Originally, my plan was to put together a new release of Nuclex.Fonts this evening, but there was a small hurricane in the area near the end of the week that uprooted lots of trees, creating a great obstacle course in the local forests. My favorite jogging route was totally buried. Well, I couldn’t help but go out there every day since the past week. Today, I took my camera with me, here are some shots from the forest trail I used to jog on:

Images of a forest road filled with fallen trees in stacks up to 2 meters high Images of a forest road filled with fallen trees in stacks up to 2 meters high Images of a forest road filled with fallen trees in stacks up to 2 meters high

I haven’t had such an intense workout with so diversified movements (due to the constant jumping and climbing) in a long time. Normally I can do the 10 km (~ 6.2 mi) in about 55 minutes (it’s rough terrain!). Now, after 55 minutes, I barely managed to pave my way through about half of the trail. My heart rate often got close to 200 bpm, making it quite difficult to jump from tree to tree. Here’s an image I tried to take of my watch’s recording after the run:

Photo of a Polar AXN 700 showing 196 beats per minute average for 55 minutes

196 beats per minute average(!) heart rate for 55 minutes. I’m not getting old quite yet :)

This shouldn’t stall my projects for long, but it was immense fun!

CeGui#

If your game needs advanced GUI capabilities, CeGui# might just hit the nail on the head for you. Marketese aside, this is a seriously good GUI library with Buttons, ListBoxes, Scrollbars, ProgressBars, Sliders, ComboBoxes and more.

Screenshot of CEGUI# rendering its GUI into an XNA window

Being a port of the well known CeGui C++ library, it is not bound to a single graphics API but can instead be easily extended to run on a multitude of environments. Out of the box, it already provides extensions to be used with: XNA Framework 1.0, Managed DirectX 1.0, SDL.NET and Tao.OpenGL.

The only real problem for XNA developers might be that it does not yet work on the Xbox 360 due to several restrictions in the functionality of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that XNA applications have to build against on the Xbox 360.