Article: WCF on the Windows Phone 7–The How to Guide
by Simon Jackson
Well at the behest of Michael B McLaughlin (@MikeBMCL on Twitter), here's a run down of what you need to know to get WCF working on the Windows Phone 7, both for Silverlight and XNA. This is just going to be a brief overview and the full detail will be included in the LeaderBoard sample for Silverlight and XNA coming soon.
Many thanks to @MikeBMCL pointing me to this post by Michael Cummings who details one approach to getting WCF working for XNA. It does work, but it’s a long way round. It did however point me in the right direction to solve the problem and now I’ve got WCF working the way I Like it. As in Working.
Article: Scripting on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Beyond!
by UberGeekGames
Scripting. It’s a recurring theme on the XNA forums: “Can I use Lua?” “Can I script on the Xbox 360?” “Scripting FTW! No, scripting FTL!”. Do a quick search for “scripting” on the XNA forums and you’ll find many threads with the preceding themes. There’s a lot of information about scripting, and it usually ends with “no, you can’t do scripting on the Xbox, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway”.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you what scripting is, a very useful type of scripting that I’ve been using more and more, and how you can make your own scripting system and use it effectively.
Article: Node-Based Scripting
by Blecki
Node-based scripting is not a traditional scripting language. And it's not a new idea, though it seems like people have forgotten about it. New systems appear - see Unreal Engine's Kismet - which people think are amazing new technologies. They aren't new; just amazing. I first encountered this scripting system in the quake engine. It was very crude, and limited, but it had all the basic properties of the system I am about to describe.
A brief note : Throughout this article, I use my own engine, Jemgine, and it's level editor for my examples. Jemgine is available at http://jemgine.codeplex.com You'll need to have XNA Gamestudio 3.1 installed to compile it, and to run the editor.
The target user of a node-based scripting system isn't the programmer, it's the level designer. The level designer might not know how to program. They might be constantly bothering a programmer to write scripts for them. Node-based scripting is an attempt to give the non-programmer level designer tools they understand and can use to create interesting behavior in a level without involving the programmer, and without having to learn a complex scripting language.
Submissions Closed
Yeah, as pointed out in the comments, the deadline was sooner than I actually said in my last email.
The submission for the 'Absolutely Fine' XNA Tutorial Contest is now closed.
We'll soon be starting formatting the rest of the articles, posting them, and then posting a master list of all entries. After that, judging and voting will begin.
Meanwhile, enjoy our news feed 