Decided to spend the afternoon making Puwang run on Windows, really don’t know why but I did it.
Took me around 3 hours, mostly because I had to add Mouse and Keyboard controls. I also added support for an Xbox360 controller to control the game, it’s very cool. You can’t use the gamepad to control menus though, sorry.

I decided to release it for Windows for free, because the game isn’t exactly designed for PC’s, has a smaller resolution, runs on window mode only and doesn’t have Leaderboards.

Here’s a video I just made of the PC version

The Game requires some external frameworks to be installed, so in event it crashes at start please make sure all dependencies are correctly installed.
-Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86)
-OpenAL
-DirectX9

So I hope you have fun, let me know what you think.

Don’t forget that you can still grab the original iOS (Universal) game here.

Download:
Puwang – (Windows) – 16.1MB

As many know since then I moved to C++ and OpenGL, and ocasionally people ask me “Can you still do that independent resolution thing?”, and yes it’s perfectly possible. I’ve used this on all latest Windows, Mac and iOS, in case you are wondering.

The code is quite straight forward actually. In case you are not familiar with what we are trying to achieve here I recommend my other tutorial first, where I explain this is more detail.

So first we need to set our viewport with proper letterbox or pillar box, if required.

 
// Let's start by clearing the whole screen with black
glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);	
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
 
// Both these values must be your real window size, so of course these values can't be static
int screen_width = 1024;  
int screen_height = 728; 
 
// This is your target virtual resolution for the game, the size you built your game to
int virtual_width=1280;
int virtual_height=720;
 
float targetAspectRatio = virtual_width/virtual_height;
 
// figure out the largest area that fits in this resolution at the desired aspect ratio
int width = screen_width ;
int height = (int)(width / targetAspectRatio + 0.5f);
 
if (height > screen_height )
{
   //It doesn't fit our height, we must switch to pillarbox then
    height = screen_height ;
    width = (int)(height * targetAspectRatio + 0.5f);
}
 
// set up the new viewport centered in the backbuffer
int vp_x = (screen_width  / 2) - (width / 2);
int vp_y = (screen_height / 2) - (height/ 2);
 
glViewport(vp_x,vp_y,width,height);

Now that our viewport is set we should set our 2d perspective

 
// Now we use glOrtho
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glPushMatrix();
glLoadIdentity();
// This function is for Mac and Windows only, if you are using
// iOS you should use glOrthof instead
glOrtho(0, screen_width, screen_height, 0, -1, 1);
/*if on iOS*/ //glOrthof(0, screen_width, screen_height, 0, -1, 1);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glPushMatrix();
glLoadIdentity();

So now we should push the transformations before actually drawing anything

// Push in scale transformations
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glPushMatrix();
 
//Now to calculate the scale considering the screen size and virtual size
float scale_x = (float)((float)(screen_width)) / (float)virtual_width);
float scale_y = (float)((float)(screen_height) / (float)virtual_height);
glScalef(scale_x, scale_y, 1.0f);

We can now proceed to drawing everything we want, that’s is really up to you now.

// Place your sprites drawing code here
// Example
glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);
glColor3f(0.1, 0.2, 0.3);
glVertex3f(0,  0, 0);
glVertex3f(50, 0, 0);
glVertex3f(0, 50, 0);
glEnd();

I really don’t recommend using glBegin() and glEnd(), this was just for simplicity, you should use glDrawElements or glDrawArrays

After you finish you drawing code we can proceed to the rest

// This pops those matrices for the scale transformations.
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glLoadIdentity();
glPopMatrix();

//Now to finish we should end our 2D perspective

glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glPopMatrix();   
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glPopMatrix();

And that’s pretty much it. I have this code on my games and it works fine, at least for what I usually need. Feel free to tweak it around for your needs. Hope this helps to get a picture on how to achieve this effect. Let me know if you find any bug.

Here’s an example of what you might achieve with this

Before going into the rest of the post, I would like to ask people to update my feed url on your RSS readers. I always used Feedburner to redirect feeds, and with Google Reader going down I decided to start switching, so in your new FeedsReader use this address: (http://www.david-amador.com/feed/). I didn’t deactivated the old one, so they will work both for now (if I didn’t broke anything). Also, give Feedly a try in case you haven’t found a replacement for Reader.

So what’s been happening? I’ll try to compress here a bunch of things that I’ve been doing, if you want to know.

Puwang new update

If you follow my twitter you may already know this, but I released a new update with two new game modes (yes, free, no IAP’s). A Hard and Survivor mode, which is pretty much self-explanatory, the Hard mode has more enemies and they spawn anywhere on the screen. Survivor mode is the same as normal but your ship won’t evolve, making it harder to survive.

I did these two modes mainly because while it can can be fun to pick up the game once in a while, once you get used to the controls anytime I played it I was like “God, I wish the faster action started faster”, because the game gets incrementally harder to play, but it starts out pretty easy. This was also something many told me personally or via twitter, so I decided to make it.
New modes have their own separate Leaderboards too.

There’s an extra feature I’m considering for Puwang, but for a later time, which is recording the game, so you can share it via Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think it might be a nice addition, but it will take some time, whenever I decide to start working on it anyway. It’s just something on my head.

There’s one extra improvement, which is the rendering pipeline was written to be faster, so less battery usage, check Dary’s Legend below for more info.

iTunes link

Dary’s Legend

This has been my main project for a long time now, I’ve been making posts about it on the game page itself, felt a bit weird to replicated them here, because I assume if anyone is interesting in knowing about the game they will probably check the official places anyway.

But related to development I might say I made some considerable improvements on the rendering pipeline, gained 10FPS in debug mode, while the game runs at 60FPS in release I always had low FPS in debug, since my pc is old, around 20-25FPS. After the changes I get 30-35FPS).

I achieved this tweaking two sections. First I cached a bunch of calculations on my Sprite class, most of they where done in each draw, which was stupid since most of the time I only needed them to be done when an image change occurs or a scale.

The other tweak was using glDrawElements instead of glDrawArrays and sending vertex data with indices. I’m not entirely sure this will lead to immediate FPS improvement but at least less data is send to GPU.

So for a quad I use GL_TRIANGLES with 4 points. Now has you know GL_TRIANGLES required 3 points per triangle, so since a Quad is two triangle this would required 6 points. So I send the 4 points with 6 indices instead. This proved particularly good for iOS devices. Much less GPU usage, which leads to a smoother game and less battery usage.

I pushed both this improvements to Puwang too.

Right now I have the next update almost finished, it’s just missing art, so it’s on the artist’s hands now, I’m already working on the next feature which are Pets.

DL Official site

New layout

If you are reading this from a feed disregard the rest of this section. As you may noticed the site has a new layout, I honestly don’t know if it’s better or worst, for now I like it. The older one had too much stuff going around, this is a bit cleaner. I’m a fan of darker themes, but it’s hard to find good ones, well, for free at least. I payed for some in the past, but the problem is as time goes by and WordPress updates they start breaking everywhere. Hope you like it, leave comments if you don’t.

Back pain

So as any programmer we eventually develop some back pain due to the very long hours we are forced to work in front of computers. I started having this occasional really intense pain for little more than a year. Not frequent, like every 2 months, lasted only like 2-3 days but to the point where I could barely walk. Of course I went to a doctor, “Drink more water he said, that’s just kidneys”. It made some sense so I decided to drink even more water, I usually keep a bottle near the computer I already drink some, but decided to drink even more. Around 3 weeks ago I had to take a 3-4 hour bus trip, the pain kicked in again, bad. Someone recommended me going to one of those guys that check your bones, if everything is ok, really don’t know the name since it’s not an official job. I went there, the guy told me I had a rib making pressure into my right kidney. He did his thing and I felt immediate relief, like magic really, of course it was only momentarily, but after that I only felt discomfort of him pulling the rib to the right place. I honestly felt bad for not having more money with me at the time, he didn’t even want any, but I gave him anyway. He told me this doesn’t mean I’m cured, I still have to control the amount of hours I spend on the computer, drink water, exercise, the usually actually, and wait and see if the really intense pain comes back. I have my movements a bit restricted now since I have to be careful for some weeks to make sure the rib doesn’t get in the way again. I feel some discomfort in that area sometimes but nothing compared to the pain it was before, and only in a couple of months will I know if it actually helped in the long run. But for now it’s much better, I’ve been able to work, I just can’t lift anything heavy for now.

Still here?

I’ve been playing some games but I’ll leave that to another separate post. Maybe two posts on the same day? Anyway I’ll try to keep this more updated and as always thanks for reading.

This is it, the last post I’ll make this year.

It’s been a wild year, much much (probably too many) work this year.

Some recap:

-We finally released DL into the wild in beta form which was a great feeling, especially since it looks like I’m working on this for ages now. General feedback has been great and that’s always a motivator.

-My small Ludum Dare experience turned out into a small but highly addictive iOS game, Puwang, well at least that’s what people tell me. I was positively surprised with that.

And…that’s pretty much it.

For next year there will be a patch for Dary’s Legend in the first weeks, much of the delay has been my fault (working on the boiling/crafting system) but some of the issues players have been telling us have been addressed.

I will now proceed to take some days off work, so I’ll finally have some time to kickback, relax and play some of those awesome games that where released this year.

Games you should try:
FTL
Little Inferno
Diablo 3
Super Hexagon

Movies that I liked:
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Looper
The Cabin in the Woods

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

(Thanks to Rita for doing this sweet wabbit with a christmas hat)

Yay, so a milestone was reached with this project. If you follow my blog you probably already know that between small projects like Puwang and other mandatory freelancing stuff my big project in hands for these past few months is Dary’s Legend, a roguelike.

Around two months ago I coincidentally bumped into a conversation about funding and the whole kickstarter thing where one of Desura staff members was participating, and while talking about my own problems funding a whole game out of my pocket he mentioned that he knew the game and that Desura’s Alpha Funding might be a good place for it.

So yesterday we released it, and you can buy the game right now, get an alpha build with a nice discount while it doesn’t reach the final build and help us funding the development along the way.

The build is relatively stable, no major crashes crashes that we know and there’s a Windows and Mac build.

Coder-Side-Notes

Personally, and although I’m happy that I managed to get a Windows and Mac build released side-by-side I’m also a bit sad that I haven’t been able to release it simultaneously for Linux as well.

Initially my thought was, “Windows only till the final release, I’ll deal with ports later”. But the market is harsh and getting into 2 different platforms can get you more chances of selling.

There wasn’t a Mac build until a month ago, but I decided to take a couple of days, created a Xcode project and build the source.
After a few tweaks and hacks I had it running, why not release it? So right now, by using Git, since projects are already configured on Windows and Mac, I just need to commit changes, boot the other machine, build and that’s it.

Linux is a little trickier, first I have little experience with that OS. Second I never had my engine running there, missing all kind of abstraction layers, directory access, mouse, keyboard, etc. And honestly right now I don’t have the time to be handling 3 versions at the same time. So Linux is probably going to be off the table until the final build is done.

Oh, another thing is that, after getting it running on Mac, I tried building for iPad, the game runs almost perfectly at 60FPS @1024×768, apart from the interface not being prepared for Touch of course, it was designer for a 2 button mouse. So there might be an iPad eventually.

This whole process has made me consider if I should’t find an “OK” (cause VS is the best) cross-platform IDE, like Eclipse or so. Configuring a project on Visual Studio, than on Xcode and another one on Linux (whatever I might end using) is an nightmare. On the other hand I could also take a plunge into makefiles with CMake…guess I’ll leave that to another project.

If you have a Ati Radeon HD 4000 or lower like me you’ll notice that there are no drivers for Windows 8 listed when you go to the AMD website. AMD only supports Windows 8 from the 5000+. And the stock ones from Windows 8 are useless, mostly on the OpenGL side, some games won’t even load, or run really slowly, like your beloved Minecraft which uses OpenGL. The stock drivers won’t even allow 2048×2048 textures

After some digging around the internet I found this article for old legacy drivers under Windows 8, weirdly not displayed on the list. So here you have it, it worked properly for me.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalystlegacywin8.aspx

Hardware:
AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series
AMD Radeon HD 3000 Series
AMD Radeon HD 2000 Series
AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series
AMD Mobility Radeon HD 3000 Series
AMD Mobility Radeon HD 2000 Series

Operating Systems:
Windows 8 64-bit Edition
Windows 8 32-bit Edition

I made a small gameplay video where, directly from the screen.

and there’s another one, offscreen, on a real iDevice here

Spread the word, buy it if you like =)

App Store Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/puwang/id566365237?l=en&mt=8

So this was a different week for me. It’s been a long time that I had the chance to work on a small prototype or a 48H competition because of my work on Dary’s Legend so I decided to stop for a couple of days and do something else.

Also my cat’s been quite sick, and between the Vet and taking care of him, working on a fun project gave me more time do everything.

Since I love shump games I decided to do one. The idea is simple, you are in a arena with your ship and you just blast enemies away.

Initially I worked around 6-8hours on this back in August but had to drop it because of some much other work I had, so it wasn’t until this monday I grabbed it again.

I decided to make the game for iOS because it’s easier to make prototypes there and I can carry them around everywhere, playing them, to see if they are any good.

Actually the first 8 hours where quite productive and this is what I had after that time:

So during these past 5 days I polished it a little, grabbed myself a notepad and hand-drawn everything. It’s not much artistic, but I’m not a designer.
Had a few problems with iOS 6 due to some deprecated stuff but in the end it all fall into place.
Also some tweaks performance-wise on the Engine where made since with a lot of stuff on screen things can get out of control pretty easily specially on these portable devices.

iPhone 5 just came out and I even took the time to add support for those extra pixels, actually I just increased the viewport, no scaling.

I probably named it poorly but it’s Puwang.

Also added some Leaderboards via Gamecenter and as I write this I’m starting to receive some feedback of the early beta builds I sent to a couple of testers. If people like it I might release it on the App Store.

If you want to participate in the beta test use this link: http://tflig.ht/SRB5aP

[Edit 10-10-2012] Puwang is now out on the app store, you can get it here

 
bool save_screenshot(string filename, int w, int h)
{	
  //This prevents the images getting padded 
 // when the width multiplied by 3 is not a multiple of 4
  glPixelStorei(GL_PACK_ALIGNMENT, 1);
 
  int nSize = w*h*3;
  // First let's create our buffer, 3 channels per Pixel
  char* dataBuffer = (char*)malloc(nSize*sizeof(char));
 
  if (!dataBuffer) return false;
 
   // Let's fetch them from the backbuffer	
   // We request the pixels in GL_BGR format, thanks to Berzeger for the tip
   glReadPixels((GLint)0, (GLint)0,
		(GLint)w, (GLint)h,
		 GL_BGR, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, dataBuffer);
 
   //Now the file creation
   FILE *filePtr = fopen(filename.c_str(), "wb");
   if (!filePtr) return false;
 
 
   unsigned char TGAheader[12]={0,0,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0};
   unsigned char header[6] = { w%256,w/256,
			       h%256,h/256,
			       24,0};
   // We write the headers
   fwrite(TGAheader,	sizeof(unsigned char),	12,	filePtr);
   fwrite(header,	sizeof(unsigned char),	6,	filePtr);
   // And finally our image data
   fwrite(dataBuffer,	sizeof(GLubyte),	nSize,	filePtr);
   fclose(filePtr);
 
  return true;
}

I’ve been using this on my projects and it works, although I read a couple of times it’s better to use p-buffer or FBO, but I leave that for you to research.

Now it’s time to add more features, everything is planned out, all cogs have a place to be, it goes smoothly for a while.

Now you realize other small components are needed, no problem, let’s make them…

Eventually you do need to plug them into the game itself, and that’s when the problems start, most of the other stuff wasn’t built considering these new components. Will they break?

What’s worse, if at some point you need to radically change something in the gameplay, this might happen. You changed it so much that most of the code just has to be thrown away. It has no place.

Not to mention that eventually trying to remove/replace some function or a core component can have serious consequences.

Well, I hope you all have a nice week!
I’m going back to work #gamedev

So this is a video compiled using Chronolapse, by taking a screenshot every 60s during a couple of days while I’m working on Dary’s Legend, the new game from Different Pixel. The video is being played back at 10 real minutes per second.

This was recorded between 14-06-2012 and 30-06-2012 (some days are missing)

According to the website itself

Visual Leak Detector is a free, robust, open-source memory leak detection system for Visual C++.

It’s pretty easy to use. After installing it, you just need to tell Visual C++ where to find the included header and library file.

Then it can be used with any C/C++ project simply by adding the following line to your code:

#include "vld.h"

It’s very easy to use and I tracked down a bunch of memory leaks hidden inside my code since the time I released Vizati.

As expected this is a heavy beast and debbuding while using VLD required much more memory, but totally worth it. You can even output to a file

I can’t find out how to embed the video with HD by default so don’t forget to see in 720p

Lately I’ve been working mostly on small UI stuff, pixel tuning every menu/button and graphical interfaces in the game. It’s a bit hard mixing a lot of menus keeping a consistent and nice user experience.

Also I’m tackling on the algorithm for the dungeon/rooms/items generation in order to keep things interesting and fresh each time the game is started.
Most of the items have a probability of showing up but still there’s much more rules that I want to place.

See you in a couple of weeks…

Oh, almost forget…

On XNA this is an out of the box option but if you’re using C++ you have a bit more work to do first.

First of all, you will need the DirecX 9.0+ sdk.

The includes.

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN // We don't want the extra stuff like MFC and such
#include <windows>
#include <XInput.h>     // XInput API
#pragma comment(lib, "XInput.lib")   // Library. If your compiler doesn't support this type of lib include change to the corresponding one

Let’s define the buttons

typedef enum
{
	GamePad_Button_DPAD_UP          = 0,
	GamePad_Button_DPAD_DOWN        = 1,
	GamePad_Button_DPAD_LEFT        = 2,
	GamePad_Button_DPAD_RIGHT       = 3,
	GamePad_Button_START            = 4,
	GamePad_Button_BACK             = 5,
	GamePad_Button_LEFT_THUMB       = 6,
	GamePad_Button_RIGHT_THUMB      = 7,
	GamePad_Button_LEFT_SHOULDER    = 8,
	GamePad_Button_RIGHT_SHOULDER   = 9,
	GamePad_Button_A                = 10,
	GamePad_Button_B                = 11,
	GamePad_Button_X                = 12,
	GamePad_Button_Y                = 13,
	GamePadButton_Max =             14
}GamePadButton;

After some digging I don’t think Microsoft exposes access to the Guide button, let me know if you find anything. Anyway it’s not something we need on Windows.

Now the GamePadIndexes

// GamePad Indexes
typedef enum
{
	GamePadIndex_One =  0,
	GamePadIndex_Two =  1,
	GamePadIndex_Three =2,
	GamePadIndex_Four = 3,
}GamePadIndex;

The GamePadIndex is to define the player position. Like on the Xbox360, this way we can control up to 4 controllers.

We need something to store the GamePad state

// The GamePad State Stuct, were we store the buttons positions
struct GamePadState 
{
	bool		_buttons[GamePadButton_Max];
	Vector2 	_left_thumbstick;               // <= I'm using a Vector2 (floats) class but you can replaced it with a float X and Y or whatever your Vector2 class is
	Vector2	        _right_thumbstick;
	float		_left_trigger;
	float		_right_trigger;	
        // Just to clear all values to default
	void reset()
	{
		for (int i=0;i<(int)GamePadButton_Max;++i) _buttons[i] = false;
		_left_thumbstick.set(0.0f);
		_right_thumbstick.set(0.0f);
		_left_trigger = _right_trigger = 0.0f;
	}
};

Now a small class

 
class GamePadXbox 
{
public: 
	GamePadXbox(GamePadIndex player)			
	{
                  _playerIndex = player;
                  State.reset();
	}
 
	virtual ~GamePadXbox(void)
	{
		// We don't want the controller to be vibrating accidentally when we exit the app
		if(is_connected()) vibrate(0.0f,0.0f);
	}
 
	bool is_connected();
        void vibrate(float leftmotor = 0.0f, float rightmotor = 0.0f);
	void update();
 
 public:
   GamePadState	State;
 private:
   XINPUT_STATE _controllerState;
   GamePadIndex _playerIndex;
 
};

Now, onto the GamePadXbox::is_connected()

bool is_connected()
{
     // clean the state
     memset(&_controllerState,0, sizeof(XINPUT_STATE));
 
     // Get the state
     DWORD Result = XInputGetState(_controllerNum, &_controllerState);
 
     if(Result == ERROR_SUCCESS)	return true;
     else return false;
}

Documentation for the XInputGetState is here.

Onto the vibrate function. Now, the Vibration accepts values between 0 and 65535. But we don’t want to be typing that every time so the vibrate accepts from a range of 0.0f (0) to 1.0f (65535);

void vibrate(float leftmotor = 0.0f, float rightmotor = 0.0f)
{
	// Create a new Vibraton 
	XINPUT_VIBRATION Vibration;
 
	memset(&Vibration, 0, sizeof(XINPUT_VIBRATION));
 
	int leftVib = (int)(leftmotor*65535.0f);
	int rightVib = (int)(rightmotor*65535.0f);
 
	// Set the Vibration Values
	Vibration.wLeftMotorSpeed = leftVib;
	Vibration.wRightMotorSpeed = rightVib;
        // Vibrate the controller
	XInputSetState((int)_controllerNum, &Vibration);
}

On the destructor I’ve placed the vibrate at 0.0f otherwise the controller may be left vibrating after your game exits until the user unplugs it.

Finally, the update() function. Now this one is more out of convenience, since you could get the state straight out of XINPUT_STATE but I think this is a more consistent way of doing it. You can decide how you want on yours.

void update()
{
	State.reset();
        // The values of the Left and Right Triggers go from 0 to 255. We just convert them to 0.0f=>1.0f
	if(_controllerState.Gamepad.bRightTrigger && _controllerState.Gamepad.bRightTrigger < XINPUT_GAMEPAD_TRIGGER_THRESHOLD)
	{
		State._right_trigger = _controllerState.Gamepad.bRightTrigger/255.0f;
	}
 
	if(_controllerState.Gamepad.bLeftTrigger && _controllerState.Gamepad.bLeftTrigger < XINPUT_GAMEPAD_TRIGGER_THRESHOLD)
	{
		State._left_trigger = _controllerState.Gamepad.bLeftTrigger/255.0f;
	}
 
       // Get the Buttons
        if(_controllerState.Gamepad.wButtons & XINPUT_GAMEPAD_A) State._buttons[GamePad_Button_A] = true;
        if(_controllerState.Gamepad.wButtons & XINPUT_GAMEPAD_B) State._buttons[GamePad_Button_B] = true;
	if(_controllerState.Gamepad.wButtons & XINPUT_GAMEPAD_X) State._buttons[GamePad_Button_X] = true;
	if(_controllerState.Gamepad.wButtons & XINPUT_GAMEPAD_Y) State._buttons[GamePad_Button_Y] = true;
	if(_controllerState.Gamepad.wButtons & XINPUT_GAMEPAD_DPAD_DOWN) State._buttons[GamePad_Button_DPAD_DOWN] = true;
		// The Rest is missing, you can figure out the rest :)
 
....
             (ThumbSticks code below)   
}

For getting all buttons here are the official flags according to msdn

XINPUT_GAMEPAD_DPAD_UP          0x00000001
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_DPAD_DOWN        0x00000002
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_DPAD_LEFT        0x00000004
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_DPAD_RIGHT       0x00000008
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_START            0x00000010
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_BACK             0x00000020
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_THUMB       0x00000040
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_RIGHT_THUMB      0x00000080
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_SHOULDER    0x0100
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_RIGHT_SHOULDER   0x0200
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_A                0x1000
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_B                0x2000
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_X                0x4000
XINPUT_GAMEPAD_Y                0x8000

The ThumbSticks are a bit more tricky. They return 2 axis each but you have to make sure they are not in the deadzone. The deadzone pretty much are values !=0 but that are not relevant and can lead to errors.

 
  // Check to make sure we are not moving during the dead zone
  // Let's check the Left DeadZone
  if( (_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLX < XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_THUMB_DEADZONE &&
	_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLX > -XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_THUMB_DEADZONE) &&
	(_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLY < XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_THUMB_DEADZONE &&
	_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLY > -XINPUT_GAMEPAD_LEFT_THUMB_DEADZONE) )
  {    
	_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLX = 0;
	_controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLY = 0;
  }
 
  // Check left thumbStick
 
  float leftThumbY = _controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLY;
  if(leftThumbY)
  {
        State._left_thumbstick.Y = leftThumbY;
  }
  float leftThumbX = _controllerState.Gamepad.sThumbLX;
  if(leftThumbX)
  {
	State._left_thumbstick.X = leftThumbX;
  }    
 
  // For the rightThumbstick it's pretty much the same.

So how would we use this then?

int main()
{
     GamePadXbox* pad = new GamePadXbox(GamePadIndex_One);
 
     while(1)
     {
       if(pad->is_connected())
       {
          pad->update();
 
          if(pad->State._buttons[GamePad_Button_BACK]==true) break;
       }   
     }
     delete pad;
}

Anyway, most of this code is not elegant or “pretty” but it should work, the idea is for you to understand the concept, the rest is up to you.