The Dark Side of the Zune And That’s The Spirit
(Pseudo) BREAKING NEWS: Andy “I Kissy Poo and I liked it” Dunn – some might name him The DirectX/XNA MVP, at least when it comes to visibility – sold his soul to The Dark Side and is a registered iPhone developer now. Although he demands the XNA Team to get their act together on the Zune right afterwards ** ** ****** ******** **** *** ********* *** **** **** *** ** **** **** *** **** ***** ************ ******* ***** *** *** ******** ***** ******* ** **** ******. Anyway, if you are the parent of a 4 year old prepare to lose your iPhone to your kids now (you already said Farewell to your 360, didn’t you?).
Meanwhile George “I CAN HAZ BE GAM3DEV THX 2 Kissy Poo” Clingerman listens to Christmas songs and John “I-think-I-can” Sedlak is the Railroad Tycoon.
Inquiring Minds And The Void
jwatte's biannual complaint about broken design decisions: Jon “Kilo Watt” Watte rightly complains about the B.A.D. triangle winding order/default cull mode not matching the right-handedness of the XNA FX; later, Matt J. Pettineo chirped in to “whine” (this author things it is as rightly as the initial complain) about the choice of a right-handed coordinate system in the first place instead of using the “standard” left-handedness of D3D.
Meanwhile, George “I ain’t bitter yet” Clingerman drinks a cup of coffee.
The rest is silence.
XNA 7 Day #3 – 100k
The next instalment of XNA 7 Day has started. Details have been published and you have just short of 7 days left to submit your entry.
Interesting approach this time, here's the rule(s).
"Your entire game (counting libraries and assets) must be no larger than 100KB (uncompressed, i.e. not the size of the CCGAME, ZIP, or RAR file you send me). The goal of the challenge is to see what type of game you’re able to create with such a limited amount of space."
The submission deadline is, 12:00pm PST (GMT-8) on December 7, 2009.
As always, you can send your entry by emailing to contact@xna7day.com with the subject line “Challenge 3 Entry”.
Please remember to read the extended rules on the about page here
Extending the GamePadState
Ever wished there was an easier way to test if one of a set of buttons are pressed on a gamepad instead of writing a very long if statement?
Nick "Don't call me 'I do too much' anymore!" Gravelyn shows how you can do exactly that in his new post called Extending GamePadState.
Need assets for your XNA games?
The guys at Punk Labs, who are currently working on Dead Shift (a "survival-horror game where anything can be used as a weapon") have compiled a very nice list of providers of quality asset packs that you can use in your Indie Games. See the whole list here.
Article : Multi-threading your XNA
by Catalin Zima
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. A Look at Multithreading Primitives
3. Multithreading Update/Draw
4. Example: Balls
5. Conclusions
6. Downloads
7. References
Softimage Crosswalk Pipeline for XNA
If you're interested in using Softimage Mod Tool for your XNA games (which you can use commercially for your XBLIG games by having a Creator's Club Premium subscription), you might be interested in the following video (found through Mykre's Virtual Realm) about the Softimage Crosswalk Pipeline for XNA, which covers the first steps with Basic Effect.
Instanced Deferred Render
Nemo Krad (of RandomChaos) continues to tease us with yet another video of his Deferred Render Instancing sample.
Let's hope he releases the code soon, because what he's doing there definitely looks sweet, and there can never be too many samples about deferred rendering, or instancing!
See all his posts about this so far, here.
X-flixel has been released onto the World
Ben Baird committed the X-flixel – a XNA FX port of AdamAtomic's flixel 2D game library, which was used to create Canabalt recently – source code to GitHub. The primary function of Flixel is to provide some useful base classes that can easily be extended to create basic game objects.
Split Screen in Sunburn
Nick "I do too much, but still can't stop" Gravelyn continues his series about using Sunburn with a new tutorial, where he shows us how to enable Split Screen when using the Sunburn rendering engine. Go take a look at it and grab the source here.
He's also asking about future stuff to do with Sunburn, so if you want to see anything in particular, let him know!