Article : Battlestar Galactica Text Effects in XNA
by UberGeekGames
If you’ve watched the excellent sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica (the 2004+ series, not the original!), you may have noticed that during scene transitions, they use a cool effect that draws text in strips. For example, when the story jumps from a Cylon Baseship back to Galactica, it might cut to an outside view of BSG and have text in the lower left corner of the screen noting the time and place. The text fades in strips, which I thought was a pretty cool effect. I decided to replicate that in XNA.
First, let’s look at the end result:
Words And Easy
Richard “Craigellachie” Thomson writes code. Vincente “Tomintoul” Cartas will talk about XNA. Charles “Dufftown” Humphrey writes about code (supposedly Catalin “Linkwood” Zima was in charge to read what was written about code…) and is a lobster.
George W. “Knockando” Clingerman shares links, has a heart of gold and is in good company.
Glenn “Miltonduff” Wilson returns to XNA while Andy “Inchgower” Dunn keeps on runnin’.
Post Mortem: Blazin’ Balls
DrMisty shares a quick Blazin’ Balls post mortem.
The two key points to keep in mind about Blazin' Balls is that a) is was a project chosen to bolster my confidence after Space Pirates and b) it was supposed to form an example project for a book, which has now fallen by the wayside. I didn't know that at release time, or I would have done some things differently. Let's break her down Mr DJ!
Post Mortem: Abduction Action!
Kris Steele follows the recent release of Abduction Action! with a post mortem for it.
Abduction Action! was intended to be completed in 3 to 4 months, thus releasing in the tale end of 2009. The initial concept would have you just abducting helpless Earthlings while avoiding gunfire from hostile ones. After a few months in development, it became clear that this concept didn't give the player enough to do in order to fill five levels with interesting content (and fun!). At this point the decision was between dropping some levels and making this a very basic game or keeping the levels and adding more to do. I felt the later option would make for a much more enjoyable game and I really hated to waste what I felt was an interesting concept on a very small game that could be quickly dismissed. The scope increase lead to development of Abduction Action! to take double the initial estimate but in doing so it became a far better game.
Continue to read about the good, the bad and the ugly.
XNA Mail Group
Via the XNA Facebook page/group/whatever reaches us the word about a newly established XNA Mail Group [Ed. I have no idea why the community needs yet another way to gather online and given the interesting post punctuation spacing it might end up quite dingens…] “for bringing together all the XNA Developers.
” [Ed. what about the forums?]
D3D HLSL Compiler And Dolly Zoom
Chuck Walbourn explains the current state of D3D HLSL compiler: bits were moved, PS 1.x support was dropped and the peons rejoice.
Meanwhile Barnaby Smith explores how to implement dolly zoom as seen on the silver screen; just wait for Avatar Vertigo to pop up on XBLIG…
Article : Sun- and Lens Flare as a Post Process
by Charles Humphrey
Now this sample has come from my current XNA toy which is the Blacksun engine I am currently writing in XNA 3.1. It uses deferred lighting, instancing and a post processing framework that I found on a great site here, all I had to do was make it engine ready.
If you want to have a look at the effect in the engine you can see it here.
This sample is just one of the elements from the post processing framework in the engine, there are none of the other goodies in this sample, just the Sun post process. This sample has also been created using the XNA 4.0 CTP, so I only had one render target to work with at the time. This means that you can't see the sun being culled behind objects in the scene as I can't create a depth map as well as the rendered scene, to be honest, I still don't have that bit of the shader 100% anyway 
A Kingdom to Conker!
That's the REAL name George "the Artist" Clingerman's next game should have. But no, he decided to use "A Kingdom to Conquer" as his temporary name....
Go quick and marvel at George's talent as he shares his character sketches for the ill-named game he's working on!
Virtual Realm’s XNA 4.0 Game Framework
Glenn Wilson shared with us his 4.0 version of the framework he uses as a base for all his games. It is based on the Game State Management sample and the Networking sample, and you can download it from Glenn's site.
Jitter Physics
Via Corporal X comes the word (well, sort of: I heard of this thing before, just were too lazy to actually post it here – looking at the news stream tells me that I am not alone on the slacker front, though) about a new, shiny and managed only physics engine named Jitter Physics. Says their PR:
Jitter is a fast and lightweight managed engine written entirely in C#. It includes it's own math framework and does not rely on third party software. The engine was written by the author of JigLibX. Jitter has some additional features including an interface following the .NET coding guidelines.
It is currently in beta and word is that “it is about 100% faster than JibLibX but also much more stable when stacking objects. It supports more default shapes (example: cone, cylinder) and it's code is just nice What is missing at the moment is vehicle and terrain support”.