Debugging the Content Pipeline
Something I always wanted to be able to do was debug the code written for the Content Pipeline, like various processors and importers you might need. I'm sure there are plenty of other people out there who feel the same.
Knowing this, Stephen probably thought it would be a good idea to tease the hell out of us with his Visual Studio extensions that allows you to debug Content Processing of Content projects. Let's hope he releases this soon for everyone to use, because it looks seriously nice.
Performance Timers for XNA
Someone with the name Aphid released XNA Performance Timers:
XNA PerformanceTimers is designed to allow you to profile the CPU time spent in different sections of your code, possibly by multiple threads, on the Xbox360.
Results are drawn by a DrawableGameComponent in the top left corner of the screen. Multiple data views are available, including:
- Raw time spent in each tracker
- Percentage of time each thread spends in each tracker
- Percentage of time each thread spends in each tracker, with same-named threads grouped together into one entry.
- Percentage of time spent in each tracker by any thread.
Hat tip to SteveKr of XNA.mag fame.
The Brotherhood
Catalin “Gone Green” Zima recycles posts on Sgt. Conker to feature John “Snow Shovel Master” Sedlak once again.
Jon “Last of the Mohicans” Watte ponders the future of PC gaming and is reflecting about the quality of his subtle way to ask questions.
Andy “Master Of The Brotherhood” Dunn will not put Chris G. “Walk Like An Egyptian” Williams onto his list, but onto the Adult Friend Finder one.
Chad “I Wrote Some Books” Carter encourages the Sarge to pick up SBARG again.
Vincente “Works On Boring Things” Cartas lobbies for Phil “The Quiet Veteran” Bourke (and so do we: IGDA members vote for Phil!).
Loïc “Epsicode And Not-A-MVP” Dansart (the Little Gamers: Teh Game chap) dropped the 1st public screenshot of his Dream Build Play entry.
Glenn “Legendary Seeker” Wilson seeks reasons for an academic XNA Code Camp in Victoria.
Post Mortem: Nasty
Another great post mortem coming from Kris, the creator of the Xbox Live Indie Games game Nasty.
Performance Testing, Gesture Recognition and Template Exporter
Kris Steele talks about his experience with performance testing while developing his XNA Game.
The new version of FGF (0.1.2.0) was released, and contains Gesture Recognition capabilities. Read all about them on John Sedlak's site.
Stephen Styrchak posted the source code to his Template Exporter on codeplex, and then posted an explanation about what StartupObject is and how it should be handled when exporting project templates.
Simple GPGPU framework
Rim van Wersch of XNAInfo.com fame released a simple framework to perform general purpose calculations on the GPU with the XNA Framework. The framework comes with two demos: one to compute Pi and the other is a simple particle system.
Head over to Simple GPGPU framework to download the code.
Initiative for joint advertising of XBLIG
XBOXHornet has posted news of his Initiative for joint advertising of XBLIG.
"We have taken the bold step of booking advertising on the Official Xbox Magazinewebsite for the month of March ‘10.
The costs of the advertising are being shared by the developers, the advertising spots are being split into six day blocks in which the games featured will have twenty thousand impressions on OXM at a fraction of the cost of advertising a single game."
You can read the full article here
Initiative to increase awareness of games coming soon
For the after the game is done, what now? time XboxHornet started an initiative to try and increase the awareness of games to come:
This is in the very early stages and will hopefully grow very quickly.
We have set up a page at www.xboxhornet.com to promote games in the works or coming soon.
This is the link to the page http://www.xboxhornet.com/xtube/index.php?pt=feature to get your game featured on this page you will need to submit your video and let us know that you would like it featured
A selection of banners can be found at the source.
Choosing A Network Library in C#
Christopher M. Park has a nice write up about the challenges he faced when implementing network support for his game AI War.
[…] I've been meaning to blog about how I chose my network library, and what I think of it, yet have failed to do so. This was particularly important to me because (spoiler alert) I really love the networking library I'm currently using and think the guy making it is also a real class act.
Continue to read the rest of the story in Chosing [sic] A Network Libary in C#.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 2)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the second part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in adding our hero to the game, and have him interact with the platforms and blocks that make up the level.