First entry to the contest received!
We have just received (by email) our first submission in The Sgt. Conker "Absolutely Fine" Tutorial Contest!
We'll arrange it soon into a nice format and post it on the site in the next few days, but we had to get the excitement off our chest first 
XNA-UK has had an overhaul
The XNA-UK User group website has had a major overhaul of its look and feel.
The XNA-UK website has lots of good content for the community and you should go check some of it out.
XNA-UK is also setting up some annual meeting which can be found on their companion site.
Storage in XNA Game Studio 4.0
Nick Gravelyn has a new blog post explaining the changes made to the Storage system in XNA 4.0
Toon Boom Studio for all 3 Winners!
The people at Toon Boom Animation just announced me that they are giving us 3 (three) copies of Toon Boom Studio for our contest.
So now, all three winners (places 1,2 and 3) are going to receive one!
About our sponsor: Toon Boom Animation offers easy to use software applications for storyboarding and animation, that perfectly fit game developers' needs. Propel your games to the next level using pre-visualization and leading-edge animation features.
The Sgt. Conker ‘Absolutely Fine’ XNA Tutorial Contest!
Hey everyone,
It's time for more details on the contest we're going to host here at Sgt. Conker.
The goal of the contest is to encourage you, our dear readers, to write the best tutorials for XNA that you can, and share it with the world! In exchange, we'll give some prizes to the authors of the best tutorials.
Our full list of prizes is still in construction, but it will include the following:
One SunBurn Community License
SunBurn is a Lighting and Rendering engine built on top of our beloved XNA Framework. As the guys at Synapse Gaming say, "combining the latest lighting and rendering technology with a flexible and easy to use framework, SunBurn performs the heavy-lifting, letting you focus on your games." For a full list of features included in the SunBurn Engine, visit their site. The license we're giving out as a prize is provided by the kind people and Synapse Gaming.
Toon Boom Studio
Toon Boom Studio is a great product for 2D animations, allowing you to use a wide range of techniques for your work, including: stop-motion animation, traditional digital animation, traditional paper animation, cut-out animation and rotoscoping. I found the product very easy to use, and it will be a great addition to the arsenal of your development tools. Toon Boom Animation Inc. are the kind sponsors that bring this to our prize pool.
Update: This is 1 copy for each of the first three places.
4-Month XNA Creator's Club Premium Subscriptions
Other stuff we can't name yet
As I said above, the list is still in construction, and we're hoping it grows until the end of the contest (by the way, if anyone in the audience is interested in sponsorship, let us know )
Now that you've seen some of the prizes, it's time for some rules:
- All entries will consist of written tutorials related to the XNA Framework.
- If source code is provided, it must work with either XNA Game Studio 3.1, or XNA Game Studio 4.0
- All entries must be submitted by email to contest@sgtconker.com
- The last day of submission is August 31 2010, 23:59 GMT
- All entries must be in english
- We do not ask for exclusivity, but by submitting the article in the contest, you agree to allow us to publish the tutorial on this site ( sgtconker.com ).
- The entries submitted must be your own creation, and the assets used in the accompanying sample code must either be your creation, or obtained with permission (ex: MSPL or MIT licenses). This might also interest you.
- We reserve the right to reject/remove any article with no explanations.
- Entries containing illegal or indecent content will be disqualified, and will not be published.
- The entries will be judged by a panel of judges, and three winners will be selected.
- Residents of the world are invited to enter the contest, provided your local laws allow you to enter such contests.
- This contest is void where prohibited.
Those are the rules for now. Remember, these are subject to change in order to protect ourselves from legal trouble. Please remember we are doing this for the good of the community and would like to continue to do so.
With all being said, I wish all of you good luck, and I hope we see some awesome tutorials!
Windows Phone 7 Tools Beta Including XNA 4
We must be getting near to the release of the highly anticipated Windows Phone 7 because Microsoft have just announced the Beta of the WP7 tools including XNA Version 4.
XNA Creators site kindly kept everyone informed here
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/news/xnags40beta
And if you want to get straight into the action go here http://creators.xna.com/en-US/launchcenter and hit the big download link.
Make sure to read the release notes as there's some fairly crucial changes in there if you've been using an older version.
Perhaps this might be a good time to start thinking of a tutorial/sample you can share with others using the new WP7 Beta.
http://www.sgtconker.com/2010/07/teaser-xna-tutorial-contest/
Using PIX with XNA Game Studio 4.0
If you ever wanted to use PIX in XNA Game Studio 4.0 and faced issues, Shawn comes to the rescue showing us how to do that.
Brute Force 2D Shadows
Because he is a much less busy man (it would seem), Charles Humprey made his own implementation for shader-based dynamic 2D shadows and posted it for everyone to see. You can read about it here.
Three links for Windows Phone Developer
If you're a developer for Windows Phone 7, the following three posts by Michael Klutcher will most likely be of use. They're one month old, but they're useful for people who didn't see them yet:
Trouble Installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools
Teaser: XNA tutorial contest
We have an important announcement to make! We are currently busy in the barracks with something we call "The Sgt. Conker 'Absolutely Fine' XNA Tutorial Contest" (temporary name).
I'm sure you can come up with some ideas about what the name means, and you can expect more details about the specifics sometime next week. Stay tuned because.... IT'S COMING!