Display Orientation on the ZuneHD
John Sedlak has two posts about using his FGF framework while working on the Zune HD and dealing with orientation.
He talks about how to support rotating and resizing of the display on the Zune HD (which supports both landscape and portrait gaming) and then continues with more explanations.
Building a 2D RPG
edg3 from RealDev started a series about Building a 2D RPG using XNA, and currently has the first two parts on his site.
They both deal with building the basic skeleton of the game, starting with planning and gamestate management and continuing with keyboard and mouse input.
If your interested in other RPG-related tutorials and content for XNA, here's some:
- Nick "Not an MVP Anymore" Gravelyn's Tile Engine Series
- Jamie McMahon series of 44 RPG Tutorials
- The Role Playing Game Starter Kit on XNA Creator's Club
- Jim "Evil MVP" Perry's book RPG Programming with XNA Game Studio 3.0
Dialogue And Effects
SCENE XVII
Twitter.
Enter Jim “Pro Gamer” Perry.
Jim. Very disappointed in this - when will developers get it through their heads that DRM for games sucks and doesn't work - http://bit.ly/74A8zg [Ed. ain’t developers as much as their publishers, no?]
Join Andy “Anti Gamer” Dunn.
Andy. Probably when gamers start paying for the games http://tinyurl.com/c3qn5h not having DRM doesn't work either
Jim. there's going to be piracy, DRM doesn't stop it and ends up hurting the people that pay, not the pirates. What's the solution? 
Andy. DRM isn't about stopping piracy - its about limiting it.
Jim. but what good does limiting it do if it only hurts the legit players? 2D Boy's comments are interesting - http://bit.ly/5271js
Andy. My guess is that if it prevents 10% of the piracy and annoys 1% of legit enough that they don't buy then its a profit!
Andy. Remember that gamers usually just complain on the forums and then go buy the game anyway… http://tinyurl.com/y8mcggj
Jim. but are the complainers the pirates? Usually not I think
Jim. how is it a profit if the pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, which is usually the case? They've actually lost money.
Andy. My guess is that they assume SOME folk will buy it if pirating is harder... copying a DVD is less risky than torrenting
Jim. you know what happens when you assume, right? 
Andy. The same as when you assume all pirates would never buy the game…
Andy. … but I guess tht the folk who decide these things have more info than me, you or anyone out there who complains
Jim. if (numPiratesWhoWouldBuy < numLegitTickedOffPlayers) fail = true; How to test this though? 
Jim. did they poll the pirates? 
Is such a poll accurate?
Exeunt.
SCENE XVIII
Enter Promit “Slim Ghost” Roy.
Promit on Secondary Effects of iTunes Game Pricing. Every so often, someone complains about the overall price depression on the iTunes App Store to rock bottom. It’s a theme that recurs fairly often, and I’m generally a little dubious about the people who are upset about it. It seems mostly to be a product of an actual free market — you may think your game is worth five dollars, but if someone is producing similar quality for one, well tough shit.
Highlight some of the secondary effects he has observed.
Promit. The upside of all this is that, like everything else, the Ghost SDK will be stupid cheap. I’m hopeful that it will be available shortly after GDC, which is not long at all.
Exit.
Pipes And Dreams
SCENE XV
The Enchanted Age site.
Enter Jon “The Native” Watte.
Jon. I used to do serialization using all kinds of fancy templates and macros. You can create pretty elegant systems that way. However, at some point, simplicity should win out. Here's a system that might work just fine for you.
Share some (in the sense of a lot) code.
Jon. I'll stop now before I write an entire message sending and receiving/dispatching system here, but if you build it up like this, it should be pretty straightforward.
Exeunt.
SCENE XVI
Twitter.
Enter Andy “Alighieri” Dunn.
Andy. Not my app, but I wrote the code! Bible Navigator X: HCSB released on #XBLIG for $5 Read the Bible on your 360. http://tinyurl.com/yd8oj9k
Descent.
Enter Jim “Integrity Is Irrelevant” Perry.
Jim. Sue me for thinking apps don't belong on a service that has "games" in the title. Still, I might write one for pay though.
Follow Andy.
XNA Developer Talks
Just a reminder that the XNA Creators club website is hosting some events where the XNA team host online sessions to discuss some interesting topics.
The first one is hosted tomorrow January 20th 2010 @ 4:00PM - 5:00PM PST, it is titled "Getting Started With Custom Shaders" and hosted by Shawn "The savior" Hargreaves.
Other planned sessions are
- Avatar integration within your XNA Game Studio title
- First impressions matter: A look at how UI animation can make the difference.
- Build games that go ‘Bing!'
You can see full details here.
Scurvy.Test v1.2 Released
Says Joel Martinez: “Quick on the heals of yesterday’s post, I’ve released v1.2 of Scurvy.Test. This is the first official release of the framework and improvements over the initial announcement are mainly centered around the status reporting of test pass/failure. I also upgraded the solution to vs 2k8 [sic] and xnags 3.1 [sic].
”
The full changelog can be found at the announcing blog post.
Icons and Bitmap Fonts Generator
Continuing their series of free stuff for everyone, the guys at Iron Start Media have released into the wilds two gifts for all game developers.
First a set of icons that you can use in your games, available here.
Second, a tool to generate bitmap fonts for your games, with details on how to use it.
Embrace And Improve
SCENE XVIII
Twitter.
Enter George W. “Point And Click” Clingerman.
George. LOL, I just realized I've been looking at the XNA forums with my profile set to "United Kingdom (English)"… I blame @The_Zman!
George. Releasing an XBLIG and immediately releasing a patch is something an Indie Game Dev can't afford to do. Get it right the first time #xna
George. @FieldsOfCarp I'm not even talking about bugs sadly but the game itself. Don't say, "Good suggestion I'll put it in the patch!" #xna #xblig
Exeunt.
Enter Andy “The Next Billy M.” Dunn.
Andy. Buy THIS http://tinyurl.com/yja8anf and NOT THIS http://tinyurl.com/yffyacw (worth the extra $$ and how often do you hear me say that!)
Andy. 2009 sales figures for almost 40 #xblig now posted - come on community post yours good or bad. http://tinyurl.com/ykrvno8
Exit.
Enter John “Don’t Quote That” Sedlak.
John. Follow Thursday! Follow @sgtconker for the latest AND greatest #xna news daily!
Exeunt.
SCENE XVIX
The Scurvy Bar (AKA CodeCube.NET).
Enter Joel “Arr NIH” Martinez.
Joel. I finally had a chance to do some long planned work on ScurvyTest, my flexible unit testing framework that was design from the ground up to be friendly to XNA project unit testing.
Outline the improvements.
Joel. Check out the latest change set if you’re curious as to the latest, otherwise you can wait for the official release here in the next weeks
http://scurvytest.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets
Exit.
Inferred And Deferred
SCENE VI
MJP’s XNA Danger Zone.
Enter Matt “Advanced Stuffs” Pettineo.
Matt. So like I said in my last post, I’ve been doing some research into Inferred Rendering. If you’re not familiar with the technique, Scott Kircher has the original paper and presentation materials hosted on his website.
Write about the Inferred Rendering implementation.
Matt. One thing you’ll notice about my implementation is that I didn’t factor in normals at all in the DSF filter, and instead I stored depth in a 16-bit component and instance ID in the the other 16 bits. This would give you much more than the 256 instances that the original implementation is limited to, at the expense of some artifacts around areas where the normal changes drastically on the same mesh.
Exeunt.
SCENE VII
Twitter.
Enter Nick “No MVP Anymore” Gravelyn.
Nick. I got my Team XNA badge on the Creator's Club website. I feel so special.
Exit for ever.