14 DAY TRIAL // A new version of Microsoft’s visual programming language is now available for download for PC users. In fact, according to the Redmond company, version 1.0.48 of Kodu is designed to bring to the table a range of new features that are PC-specific. Just a reminder for those that are not familiar with Kodu, the company’s visual programming language for game development is offered in two flavors, for Windows PCs and for Xbox consoles. Kodu 1.0.48 is available exclusively for Windows customers, and will make it easier for game developers to work with the keyboard and the mouse. In addition, Microsoft has worked to fix a variety of bugs in this release.
“You can now say When Mouse Move Do Turn and have your bot turn left/right based on the screen position of the mouse cursor. The further to the left or right you move the faster the bot will turn,” a member of the Kodu team revealed. “You can now program a bot to move in response to mouse clicks. Mouse clicks can either be on another bot or on the terrain.”
But there are additional enhancements. Microsoft revealed that keyboard movement had been optimized to blend correctly. Specifically, the characters will move forward when pressing W, will turn left when A is pressed, or will do a right turn for D. At the same time, developers leveraging Kodu will be able to use the mouse in firing scenarios. In mouse edit mode, devs will be able to simply hover the mouse cursor over a bot in order to have it identify itself through a thought balloon.
“New Snap-To-Grid feature: when this is active this will cause dragged objects to ‘snap’ to the center of the terrain blocks. This makes it much easier to create nicely aligned rows of objects. During terrain editing this also ensures that the brush size stays an exact number of terrain blocks in size. This should make it much easier to create terrain elements (walls, buildings, etc.) that stay aligned to a fixed grid. When raising and lowering terrain this will also cause the change in elevation to be done in increments of 1 block rather than smoothly. Snap-To-Grid can be toggled on/off by pressing F3 while in edit mode. You can tell when it is active because the cursor position will be displayed in the lower left hand corner of the screen,” the Kodu team representative added.
Kodu Game Lab - Technical Preview is available for download here.