A Petition And a Port
There is a petition open for signature to convince Microsoft to open the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace to all countries (or in which phones are available at least).
The other thing is a fund raiser to release ExEn: XNA for iPhone [Ed.: iOS?], Android and Silverlight under the Ms-PL and add Android support.
Fonts and Animations
Markus Ewald shows off his custom way of handling fonts in XNA 4.0 with the purpose of increasing quality.
XNA Sprite Font Quality
Alexandru-Cristian Popescu share and Animation Library for XNA 4.0, and also a Library to read DDS files from a file.
Animation Library
Articles: MVC in games
by Roy Triesscheijn
MVC Primer
MVC stands for "Model View Controller" and has been an architectural pattern in software engineering for quite some time now. MVC allows decoupling between what 'the program is supposed to do' and how this is made visible and controlled.
In MVC the three main responsibilities of the application are handled by three separate parts:
- The model houses the actual business logic. The model is totally decoupled from the controller and view.
- The view observes the information from the model, and if needed request an update of the information. Data from the model is lightly massaged, formatted and then presented.
- The controller controls the application by mapping different kinds of input to public methods available on the model. The model itself always has the final responsibility of doing something with the request made by the controller. In many form-based applications the view and controller are hard to distinguish from each other.
Using MVC will allow you to reuse your complex model in different scenarios. Want to prepare your program for a different kind of input? Just write a new controller. Want to visualize your data in another way, just write a new viewer. In a good application controllers and viewers can even be changed while the application is running.
SharpDX 1.0 Released to the Masses
Fresh off the press comes the word that SharpDX – the not so competitive competitor to SlimDX – 1.0 release is official now.
This first version can be considered as stable. The Direct3D10 / Direct3D10.1 API has been entirely tested on a large 3D engine that was using previously SlimDX (thanks patapom!). Migration was quite straightforward, with tiny minor changes to the engine's code.
Continue at the source to learn about the key features and benefits of this new API. Additionally, there is an interesting tidbit for the XNA crowd at the very end of the post:
Finally, I'm going to be able to use this project to make some demos with it! Next target is to develop a XNA like based framework based on SharpDX.Direct3D11.