More MVPs vs PC Gamers And a RTR
Looks like addressing PC gamers is becoming a trend in the circles of the XNA MVPs: The last unnecessary for insult comes from no one else but Mr. Nick “I did too much so I couldn't have a real life” Gravelyn himself, calling the hardcore PC gamers a “crowd” and “whiners” – only to join the crowd whining a bit later… On the bright side: the 2nd round of the XNA 7 Days challenge just started today.
At least Jon Watte is still actively pro Windows as a gaming platform while the rest remains in a safe silence…
Andy “The Zman” Dunn and George Clingerman finished Kissy Poo and will hit review on Wednesday! (RTR: Release To Review)
A Slim Future and Fat Past
Promit Roy talks about the future plans of SlimTune and asks to file issues and feature requests against it (without actually providing a link, though, but here’s the link to its Google Code project page). I, for one, would like to see a Kitchen Sink in it. Oh, and a Pony!
In a successful effort to resemble Indiana Jones (the Fate of Atlantis Indy, not the Crystal Skull one) our resident MVP Captain ZSquare started his archeology seminar Scrolls from the Past with the first installment Profiling, digging the artifacts of long forgotten knowledge in the lands of the XNA FX. He also reached the hysterical mark of 2,500 posts in the Creators Club Online forums on Nov 6 (albeit that’s nothing compared to the OVER 9,000! posts of The Zman over there – I considered to add some words about quality vs. quantity but realized that it wouldn’t work out well…).
John Sedlak returns to (relevant) blogging with an introduction to his Focused Games Framework (FGF) FGF: Getting Started – and addressing PC gamers with a nice, warm and appreciative [2009-11-05 18:28:38] (@Krisc) man are pc gamers a bunch of whiners – in which he outlines the setup for coding the framework itself.
Meanwhile, Andy “The ZMan” Dunn and George W. Clingerman are still working hard to get Kiss Poo ready to push onto XBLIG. If you’re a parent of a 4 year old you might want to lock the 360 away for some time to keep it away from this “crack”…
Scrolls from the past: Profiling
Because sometimes old things never gets old, and valuable knowledge gets lost with the passing of time, it is best to bring it back to attention, so that young generations can benefit from those that came before them. This week, we'll unearth a couple of scrolls talking about profiling your XNA games.
Let's start with the spring of 2007 (Year 1 of the Age of XNA). As brave programmers started using XNA, they started to worry about the effects that this new form of magic would have on their surroundings, which had to be kept free of residual energies (a.k.a. garbage). People were most worried about the foreach spell, rumored to generate such energies. Thus, the mighty wizard Eli looked into the problem, and wrote two scrolls on how the foreach spell is better used, but most importantly, he left us notes on how to investigate such problems ourselves, through a ritual called memory profiling, using the CLR Profiler, and the XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor for Xbox 360. These two scrolls can be found and read in Eli's book here and here.
At the same time, another XNA apprentice wrote about a related ritual called CPU profiling, through which other XNA apprentices could learn why their creations were slow, and lazy, by using a tool called NProf. Those that want to can still read Thomas Aylesworth's writings here.
Over a year later, bittermanandy was writing a chronicle about what recipes and rituals he found most useful in his delvings into XNA, and in one of these chronicles, he touched on the subject of the CLR Profiler again. That same year, jwatte gave away a free potion that could be used for performing the profiling ritual in the kingdom of the Xbox 360, which was not possible using NProf. MJP made a comparison between events and virtual functions, using the Stopwatch spell, and left his writing for all to read in one of his scrolls.
More recently, in Year 3 of the Age of XNA, the Grand Master Wizard Shawn, reminded all of us how important is that we use the profiling rituals as often as possible, and gave us an example of using the blunt yet powerful spell Stopwatch.
We hope you liked our return to past scrolls of wisdom, and found something of help in them. Please let us know what you think, and leave a note in the notebook below.
Article : Realistic Soft Edged Water In XNA
by X-Tatic
Still water bodies are a powerful distinguishing factor for identifying an outdoor scene. The nature of this water, such as a lake, makes it challenging to render efficiently while still maintaining a believable sense of realism. There are several factors that need to be considered when rendering such a water body and in this article I will cover each one while presenting the technical details.
A Retreat Without Goodbye
As we learned on Tuesday, November 3rd, at 12:48 CET, Nick "I do too much" Gravelyn finally realized that there’s much more to life than just the XNA community.
Following the realization he now searches to pass the torch of maintaining the Facebook App and Xbox Indies – one of the greatest sites for gamers to discover Xbox Live Community Games – to someone else. Drop Nick a line or two to appreciate his selflessness for raising the awareness of XNA (used in the official, not so stellar communicated meaning of XNA GS/FX here) and to make an offer to either take over the app or the site if you are interested.
We here in the headquarter (as we like to call these shabby barracks that are our home) like to send out big “thank you’s” to the once restless community memberleader and wish him to succeed in his crusade for private time: Hoch die Tassen!
The Week in Code (XVIII)
Do a little dance, because it’s dance time.
- Importing and rendering XAML shape data in XNA Game Studio Manders vs. Machine created a content importer for XAML
- XNA Controller Library (version 1.1) Released cooltoolsonline (weirdish name) released on update to their (her? his? who knows, information is a bit sparse over there…) controller library that lets you bind input actions to methods in a simple way
- Zune HD Forms - A View of the Controls (because the Sergeant - and he only - like the Zune) Jarstan introduces the Zune HD Forms, a set of Windows Forms inspired UI control library for the Zune
This post is sponsored by Kissy Poo: Because it's dancing time!
BRAINS : Zune HD
We are pleased to announce that the BRAINS source code has been updated to support the Zune HD.
There were some issues around the way Grids were dynamically created using CreateInstance but this has been resolved and BRAINS now runs full featured on the Zune HD.
I’ve yet to port all the samples which exist in Windows as there is no primitive drawing available on the Zune. This means I have to draw any grid like debug rendering using SpriteBatch. I’ll provide another update once the samples are ported.
Not sure what BRAINS is ?
See our official page here "BRAINS consists of a basic AI Agent structure with locomotion and a Grid based world in which they live."
You can also grab the latest version of the source here in zip form.
Take a look at our other affiliated projects, IceCream & TinyEngine (with Zune HD support) along with our recommended Open Source XNA Projects.
The XBLIG Community vs. Time Trials & a Facebook App
This is the first of a (hopefully) infinite number of MVP Watch posts, in which we will cover the community work of the Direct/XNA MVPs.
It started with the usual and quickly locked whining thread, causing a reasonable reply in a new thread by Daniel Hanson, leading to a connect issue, gathering various levels of MVP support: Nick Gravelyn supports it full heartily (even by unlocking the “good” thread again!), while George Clingerman tries to bring forum reputation into the length of the time limit (not sure if he just tries to be sarcastic there, though…).
After long hours of hard and exhausting journalistic investigations (yes, in these ages watching a stream of tweet is considered such…) it could be uncovered that the very same Nick “If I do not do it no one else will” Gravelyn will release his Xbox Indies Facebook app soon.