A New (And Interesting) Managed Direct3D API
Alexandre Mutel introduces A new managed .NET/C# Direct3D 11 API generated from DirectX SDK headers that avoids the use of C++/CLI entirely to enable Any CPU compilation of C# code. Looks like SlimDX finally has some worthy competition.
WP7 Performance educational content
The App Hub has just received some excellent new educational content on performance related subjects.
Add these powerful tools to your next game and take advantage of profiling, frames-per-second counting, and an on-screen customizable debug console, all in one handy package
If you’d like to take the performance utility out for a spin and learn about 3D drawing and performance in the process, try this 3D demo, already instrumented with the powerful performance utility.
Debug and tune your game with visual data using this heavily-optimized batched rendering sample that can be called from anywhere in your game to render lines, triangles, bounding boxes, frustums and spheres, all with tunable lifetimes.
Performance Considerations for WP7 Article
Get answers to Windows Phone 7 performance questions around content loading and memory management, as well as instructions on using the CLR Profiler to dig deep into allocations and garbage collection.
Best Practices for WP7 Games Article
If you’ve got aspirations of being on Windows Phone Marketplace, be sure to read this guide on bringing the best experiences to your potential customers. Learn the best practices around graphics, input, audio, and storage for games on Windows Phone 7.
Tombstoning for WP7 Games Article
Learn how to play best in the Windows Phone 7 environment – learn how to handle and recover from interruptions that require your game to save state, exit, and return later with state and content intact.
Bonus: Memory Madness 4-Point Multi-Touch Lab
Curious about Windows Phone 7’s four-point multitouch capability? Try it out and learn how to implement it yourself with this challenging memory game!
Original Source
Code From The Forums
Some code (well, more like library) announcements from the Creators Club OnlineAppHub forums.
First, there is GPF – WPF for XNA by genralhi (the blog links are in Russian), which looks interesting even though the full WPF might be a bit overkill for game UIs. Second, MicroMan6502 announces his EasyThreading library to “provide something to the community”.
Welcome to the App Hub
In a surprising turn of events, the XNA creators website goes down. Never to be the same again.
Microsoft have launched the App Hub, which is for both XNA Indie Games on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7.
An interesting twist in the tail is that if you already have a XNA Subscription, you are now a Windows Phone developer also.
You can submit to both areas with the same single account. How amazing is that?
Enough rambling, go check it out http://create.msdn.com/en-US/
Acid Rain TileMap and Camera System XNA Tutorial
Here's a tutorial on the TileMap and Camera system used by Allan Chaney in his game, Acid Rain.
Go read it on his site.
Results for the Absolutely Fine XNA Tutorial Contest
We have judged, we have analyzed the votes received from you; and now we have our winners!
The first place goes to
Rolling World Tutorial
by Christian Schlager
His prize consists of:
- One SunBurn Community License
- One License for Toon Boom Studio
- One 12-Months XNA Creator's Club Premium Subscription
The second place goes to
XNA Farseer Platform Physics Tutorial
by Roy Triesscheijn
For his hardwork, he receives:
- One License for Toon Boom Studio
- One 4-Months XNA Creator's Club Premium Subscription
And finally, the third place goes to :
Programming your first XNA 4.0 game for PC, Xbox 360 & Windows Phone 7: Pong
by Thomas "Mister Helmut" Altenburger
He also receives:
- One License for Toon Boom Studio
- One 4-Months XNA Creator's Club Premium Subscription
Congratulation to all of our winners. They deserve it!
We'd like to thank our sponsors for their support:
- Toon Boom Animation Inc. for the Toon Boom Licenses
- Synapse Gaming for the SunBurn Community License
- Cpt. ZSquare, for the Creator's Club subscription codes
- Everyone in the Sgt. Conker barracks for the hard work they put in
And another set of thanks and applause go to all of our participants, who worked hard to bring us all the articles.
Here they are again, in all their glory:
- Arbitrary Shaped Secondary 2D Viewports, by Harry Trautmann
- Character Movement, by David Kendall
- Derived Effect Classes in XNA 4.0, by Dave Carlile
- Input Playback, by Jesse Chounard
- Multiple columns with Game State Management, by Jeff Brown
- Node-Based Scripting, by Blecki
- Programming your first XNA 4.0 game for PC, Xbox 360 & Windows Phone 7: Pong, by Thomas "Mister Helmut" Altenburger
- Rolling World Tutorial, by Christian Schlager
- Scripting on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Beyond!, by UberGeekGames
- Shaders - Introduction, by Daniel Greenheck
- Shaders - Ambient Lighting, by Daniel Greenheck
- Shaders - Diffuse Lighting, by Daniel Greenheck
- Shaders - Specular Lighting, by Daniel Greenheck
- Shaders - Texturing, by Daniel Greenheck
- Shaders - Rim Lighting, by Daniel Greenheck
- Simple 3D Camera in XNA, by Pete Street
- Texture Modification using Render Targets, with some Stencil Buffer Action, by Dave Carlile
- Vacant Skies - Action RPG Tutorial Series, by Aaron T Foley
- WCF on the Windows Phone 7 - The How-To Guide, by Simon Jackson
- XNA Farseer Platform Physics Tutorial, by Roy Triesscheijn
About our sponsors
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. In their own words: "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." I found the product very easy to use, and it will be a great addition to the arsenal of your development tools.
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.
Posts from people working on the XNA team
Here's a list of interesting stuff posted this week by people working on our beloved XNA!
Shawn Hargreaves:
- Efficiently loading large arrays or lists
- Serializing collections of shared resources, part 2
- Iterator state machines
Shawn Hargreaves and Charles Cox Talk XNA Game Studio on Channel 9
Aaron Stebner:
- Configuring and testing icon images in XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone games
- What XNA Game Studio 4.0 functionality works in what version of Visual Studio and on what version of Windows
- Steps to upgrade an XACT project so it can be used with XNA Game Studio 4.0
Michael Klucher:
Nick Gravelyn:
- My AppWeek 2010
- Batch your polygons
- Don’t reinvent those wheels
- Don’t build more than what you need
- The delights of DualTextureEffect
XNA Creator's Club Online:
XNA Tile Engine Base Solution for WP7
Gareth Williams has posted news of his Tile Engine solution for XNA which runs on Windows Phone 7.
And a handy list of all the features of the solution:
- Suitable for side-on and top-down games
- Good for platformers, RPGs, shooters, racers, adventures - anything that needs tiles!
- Works in landscape or portrait with one line change.
- Built on the Windows Phone 7 XNA Gamestate Management engine sample.
- Uses Nick Gravelyn's content pipeline extension for the "Tiled" editor.
- Simple but flexible camera class that clamps to the map boundaries.
- Draw the whole map at once, or one layer at a time for flexibility.
- Parallax scrolling simply by adding a couple of properties to a layer in Tiled.
- An overload to draw a layer as "shadows" by drawing offset+black+semi-transparent.
- Per-pixel colour-based collision detection on specified layers/tilesets.
There's a link to the sample project on his blog, please read the rest of this post along with trying out the sample.
Source
Voting is now closed!
As the title says, voting is now closed for the tutorial contest!
We will judge/evaluate all the entries and all the votes, and announce the winners next week!
Thanks to everybody that took part in the contest, both by sending in their entries, and by voting!