Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 3)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the third part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in making our hero animated.
Placeholder in Games
Barnaby Smith shares his thoughts about using placeholder assets during the development of games:
Creation and use of placeholders, whether levels, 3d models, sprites or sounds, has a number of advantages when developing computer games. In this article I discuss some aspects of the use of placeholders in games.
Free Game Assets 09, Windows Phone 7 Development tutorial series 03 and death to white pixels!
Iron Star Media released a new pack of free stuff, this time containing Photo Quality Textures.
A few days ago, Dark Codex Studios (also known as MVP Petri Wilhelmsen) released the third part of his series of tutorials related to Windows Phone 7 Series Development in XNA.
Kris Steele has a new blog post about "how to create a content importer to fix white edges that appear when importing png files from Adobe Photoshop. This is something that is frequently asked about on the forums and probably the best fix I've seen for it (aside from using a different texture format)" (his own words). The solution he gives is an elegant one, and you can read all about it on his blog.
Article: Windows Phone 7 Push Notifications
by Sgt. Conker
In this article I will explain how to use the Push Notification features of Windows Phone 7 using 2 very simple samples.
The push notification features of Windows Phone 7 enable you to push a message to a mobile device with 3 options.
- Tile notification – This lets you change the main application tile on the Start experience.
- Toast notification – This lets you popup a message on the device even if your application is not running.
- Raw notification – This lets you send raw data to the running application which you can receive via an event.
For this sample, we’re going to concentrate on Toast notification. While Tile notifications will be cool, we unfortunately can’t make use of them with the current build of the emulator.
As a teaser, here is the result we want.
Depth And Games
Matt “Blitzkrieg” Pettino fights with the depth buffer and Charles “One” Humphrey flags bits in XNA.
Meanwhile, George W. “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” Clingerman stares at walls, not goats and Chris G. “Fade to Black” Williams says Good Night.
Glenn “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” Wilson installs the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP finally, Jon “Escape” Watte releases a beta of kW X-port 1.4.5 for 3DS Max 2010 and in a desperate move Andy “Harvester of Sorrow” Dunn begs for common sense to be applied during peer review. Following the lead of desperation, Iñaki “Whiplash” Ayucar fulminates against clones, strongly.
John “Motorbreath” Sedlak has a new jacket, with a back, plays games, writes cryptic code. Joel “Ride the Lightning” Martinez loves LINQ and threats to release a game. Finally, Chad “Hit the Lights” Carter is a happy daddy.
Render Target Changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0
The Shawn of Hargreaves details the changes to the render target API in XNA Framework 4.0. The high level summary of these changes are:
RenderTarget2Dinherits fromTexture2DandRenderTargetCubefromTextureCubeto properly denote the Is-a in the API (no moreRenderTarget*.GetTexture())- Multiple render targets are set at once without explicitly specifying its index and all previous set render targets are unset automatically
- An optional depth buffer for a render target is now a property of the render target itself, which might be shared across multiple render targets if certain conditions are met
For the motivation and details of these changes see Rendertarget changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0.
Sound in XNA, Part II
manzanotti continues his exploration of in Sound in XNA using XACT, looking at the benefits of XACT.
If you know nothing about adding sound to an XNA game, it is fair to say that you will get up and running quicker using the new classes rather then using XACT. However, despite that, I have to say that I'd still recommend that you bite the bullet and get stuck in to XACT. Sure, there's that learning curve, but you get a lot of functionality in XACT for a lot less effort than you'd have to put in to reproduce it yourself in code. And writing less code has got to be a good thing!
An "Open Letter" to the XBLIG Developer Community by DrMistry
DrMistry of Mstar Games fame wrote an Open Letter to the XBLIG developer community about how the “race to the bottom” not only hurts you but the whole channel:
Having been through the idea > dev > release cycle two and two thirds times now, and in combination with having learned a lot from my last game and trying to work out what last year's sales figures tell us, I have a few observations I'd like to share about where I think the channel is going in terms of image, quality, quantity and pricing. Some of you I know disagree with my thoughts on this, and I'd welcome an informed debate. But "informed" is the operative word ;0)
Continued reading and comment at An "open letter" to the XBLIG Developer community.
HOWTO: Resolution Independent Rendering in 2D
David Amador shares his code to work with a fixed resolution on Windows without having to manage the placement of your renderables yourself. Sez David:
Independent Resolution Rendering?? What’s this all about?
Basically a way of not caring what you resolution is. Ever had Gui elements misplaced because you changed the resolution? Or getting out of the screen?
If you are doing a game on Xna just for Xbox360 you can basically use a 1280×720 base resolution and the Xbox will scale the game for you making the proper Letterbox.
But what about on Windows? Or if you use a different resolution on the Xbox? You have to manage that yourself.
I’ve made a small example on how to achieve this.
HOWTO: Choose The Right Framework For Your Windows Phone Game
Michael Klucher posted a quick explanation of the different application models in the Silverlight and XNA Framework to help you deciding what framework to use for your Windows Phone game. Ends his post:
There’s no perfect “one size fits all” answer to help you make the choice for what is best for your game, so you’ll want to think about the tools you want to use, and the type of experience you want to enable when approaching developing your game.