Ignoring a Hidden Clingerman to Visit Germany
Looks like there were a new addition to the league of XNA/DirectX (didn’t that read DirectX/XNA once?) MVPs: the German Roland “Glatzemann” Rosenkranz, who is running amokcausing havockeeping posting on the XNA.mag and our beloved AppBuh forums. Congratulations, chap!
Meanwhile, in Jim “So Evil That Even George Ducks and Covers” Perry-land the Overlocker himself continues to spam his blog. This time, he covers Spy Game Design – Multiplatform Issues/Capability and Spy Game Design – Character Training. Lets see if he can keep up the pace while The Hidden One continues to, well, hide.
The Replacement Clingerman
As George W. “Father of an Army” Clingerman went quite quiet recently (conspiracy theorists claim he’s the XNA/XBLIG community manager now and hence is as quiet as the void that wasn’t a community manager…) we have to turn our head to the Evil MVP Jim “The Replacement Clingerman” Perry, who replaced locking with blogging what seems to be some sort of The Spy Game Design Series:
- Spy Game Design – Agent Specialties
- Spy Game Design – Inventory and Related Areas
- Spy Game Design – Assignments/Missions
- Spy Game Design–Death
- Spy Game Design – Advancement
- Spy Game Design – Combat
- Spy Game Design – Identities
And, compared to the AppBuh Forums mess his forums are alive and kicking.
Catalin on 2D Skeletal Animations
Catalin “Too Proud To Self-promote” Zima (you might know him as our local XNA MVP Captain ZSquare) has a nice write-up of 2D Skeletal Animations over at his blog. So, if you ever wondered what the benefits of skeletal animations in the 2D world as compared to our beloved sprite sheets are, his post would be your starting point to explore this very topic.
The Joplin Tornado Fund for DeathmatchGames
Via The Dead Pixel Society comes the word about the impact of the Joplin Tornado on the XNA community:
As you may or may not know (until now) a fellow XNA developer @DeathmatchGames and his family were victims of the May 22nd tornado that ravaged Joplin, MO. You can find extensive coverage of the tornado and the devestation [sic] it's caused at CNN.com, Google, and everywhere else.
Head over to the DeathmatchGames - Joplin Tornado Fund to read more and to learn about the ways to help.
High End Performance Optimizations on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7
Ian Nicolades
Technical Director, UberGeekGames
For the Xbox or Windows Phone 7 programmer, performance is something that should always be kept in mind. For any moderately complex game, it can be very easy for framerate issues to crop up, and seeing as those pesky gamers insist on having a smooth playing experience, it can quickly become problematic.
Having had quite a bit of experience in this area with our last few games, this article will be a “missing manual” of sorts; the kind of cheat sheet that would have saved me more than one headache! 
Windows Phone 7 Unleashed Hackathon
Via Chris G. Williams comes the word of an upcoming Windows Phone 7 hackathon in Atlanta, Georgia. Quotes the Chris:
This is a "hands on" hackathon where you will learn from Windows Phone 7, XNA and Azure experts how to build, scale and publish your Windows Phone 7 app or game. If you are just a beginner, or already have apps in the Marketplace this event will should not be missed. BYO Laptop!
RSVP early, space is limited to 300 attendees: http://bit.ly/RegWP7Hackathon [Ed.: The unshortened URL for the event details is here]
(YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A TECHED ATTENDEE TO COME TO THIS!)
Hiding a Clingerman to Talk Natively
In Benchmarking C#/.Net Direct3D 11 APIs vs native C++ (a post from March 14, I wonder why I did not share this already…) Alexandre Mutel explores the cost of calling native APIs from managed code (AKA interop) via micro benchmarking various managed Direct3D 11 APIs. He does this because:
Hopefully, in SharpDX unlike any other DirectX .NET APIs, this code has been written to be consistent over the whole generated code, and was carefully designed to be quite efficient… but still, It has obviously a cost, and we need to know it!
Spoiler: The offerings Microsoft has in store are, by far, slower than SlimDX/SharpDX.
In other news: There is a thread over in the AppBuhAppHub forums praising the XNA MVPs. We here in the barracks fully support that effort – mostly due to the fact that Captain ZSquare has access to various arms here and we lost the keys to lock up the arsenal… – so you might head over to add to the +1 (none of the Google +1 stuff) choir.
Recommendations on Resuming
Coming hot from the freshly-awarded MVP Michael B. McLaughlin, a set of no less than eight (8= 2*4 = 3+5 = 10-2) tips to improve the experience of users when they need to close and resume your XNA game on Windows Phone 7. The article is a must read for everyone who doesn't want to annoy their customers.
Go ahead and read it now.
Posing a Clingerman to Welcome Our New Overlords
That’s right: George W. Clingerman finally stopped pretending being a developer/programmer/someone who knows code to pursue a career as DJ now, going by the nick DJ Cling-Star. Meanwhile, there are three new additions to the happy bunch that is known as the Direct/XNA MVPs:
The third one is MIA currently… [Update: OK, our intelligentintelligence services managed to get ahold of his name now, Dr. Minh-Triet TRAN, but not many more details…]
Lets hope thisthese guys can fulfill the demands of the community…
[Update: Moo]
Things go wrong! and now the news.
Recently the Sgt. Conker server had a bit of a hiccup, our e-mails were getting clogged up and we missed a few things.
No major damage was done, and no soldiers were harmed in this unfortunate outbreak.
And now the news.
George continues his onslaught of posting all things XNA News by bringing you XNA Notes 012.
Ploobs Game Engine - another open source XNA Engine. The engine boasts a huge list of features which you can see just under the screenshots on the codeplex page.
Unfortunately it’s for XNA 3.1, but it looks pretty, and hopefully wouldn’t take much to upgrade to XNA 4.0. Thanks go to Thiago Dias Pastor for bringing this to our attention. He also made me aware of a downloadable document here which is an extensive explanation of the techniques used in the engine. Unfortunately it’s in Portuguese which limits the audience some what.
Optimizing Bounding Boxes in XNA – Robert Walter brings a decent article on how to optimize bounding box collisions in XNA.
Tower Defense Tutorials - This website has 14.5 articles on how to build an XNA Tower Defense game. Looks like a nice resource.
Neoforce controls – This is something I completely missed. A skinnable GUI library for XNA 4. Looks stunning, possibly a bit overkill but still … worth a try at least.
Disclaimer : this project is no longer maintained or developed (but it’s open source)
And lastly, some support for a very cool XNA engine.
SunBurn Game Engine is looking HOT! – Here’s some news from the Synapse Gaming team.
SunBurn Game Engine: Full Windows Phone 7 Support
Synapse Gaming’s SunBurn Game Engine has led the pack when it comes to technology for XNA. And our latest SunBurn update solidifies that commitment with full support for Windows Phone 7.
This is not some add-on or a small subset of the engine. Instead it includes all of the features and systems the hardware is capable of supporting, and using the same api, content pipeline, and design as on Windows and Xbox. This allows a game to run across all three platforms without any modifications, while still being able to take advantage of SunBurn's advanced features like deferred rendering, HDR, and more on Windows and Xbox.
Windows Phone 7 features in SunBurn include:
- Diffuse and emissive mapping
- Volume lighting
- Bloom / post-processing
- Baked-down lighting on static objects (see below)
- Composite lighting on dynamic objects (see below)
- Collisions
- Use the same scenes, light rigs, code, tools, and api on Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone 7
SunBurn 2.0 also includes in-editor baked-down lighting, which generates light maps that render with none of the overhead of the real-time lighting (rendering nearly for free). This makes highly detailed lighting and shadows possible on Windows Phone 7 (which does not support dynamic lighting and shadows).
To learn more, and see SunBurn WP7 games and demos in action, go to http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2010/11/16/sunburn-2-0-goes-mobile-on-windows-phone-7.aspx