Article: Draw me a line (Zune HD)
by Sgt. Conker
This article will show you how to create a dotted line based on touch input from the Zune HD.
This can be very useful for indicating to the user a path a game entity is going to take.
If you've ever played Flight Control for the iPhone you'll know exactly what I mean.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 2)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the second part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in adding our hero to the game, and have him interact with the platforms and blocks that make up the level.
Article: Using XNA Content pipeline extensions for localization. (Part 2)
by Roy Triesscheijn
Recap
So… last time we made our strings localizable and added-in a new content manager. Today we are going to make all our content localizable, but first we should revisit and refactor “yesterday’s code”.
After publishing part one and having a good week to think about part two, I found that some of my design choices, which seemed nice, where actually at bit cumbersome.
Also the xml parsing (in BABProcessor) wasn’t as robust as I wanted it to be because I forgot about localized formats for dates and numbers.
Fixing our xml loading is easy, so let’s first fix that!
Article: Using XNA Content pipeline extensions for localization.
by Roy Triesscheijn
Introduction
In this tutorial series I will show how to setup a simple Content Pipeline extension. At first it will be used to parse XML files containing text and their translations, in a part 2 we are going to extend our processor to also parse other xml files which contain data about localized textures and sounds. We extend XNA’s content manager to make use of all this extra data.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 1)
by Casey Young
This is the first part of a series on how to create a simple platformer game. Each article in this series will go through one or more simple aspects that make up a platformer. By the end of the series, you should have a basic platformer to build off of.
Article: Lens Flare Occlusion using Texture Masking and XNA
by Dave Charlile
Introduction
One of my side projects for the past couple of years has been a realtime fractal planet generator. It’s a huge project and not one I expect to ever really finish. But it has provided a great place for me to learn XNA and 3D programming techniques.
Article: HDR Rendering with XNA
by MJP
One of the “must-have” effects for modern video games is HDR rendering. When used, it allows for the rendering of beautiful and realistic lighting effects
that utilize luminance values with a very high dynamic range. This makes for beautiful scenes, and can also simplify the creation of artwork and assets as extremely bright or dark areas are no longer special case scenarios.
This sample presents a basic implementation of a typical HDR pipeline using the XNA Framework. The sample also implements a PostProcessor class, which can be extended for other post-processing tasks (such as depth of field, motion blur, etc.) The graphics code is all compatible with both the PC and the 360, however the sample itself only includes a Windows PC project.
Article: Grid-based Isometric Renderer Tutorial
by Martin Actor
A lot of people have asked about isometric rendering, with specific attention to sorting so that things overlap properly. This tutorial will show you a method that is both fast and accurate. The approach is specifically engineered for isometric view, grid-based games. It is not well-suited to adaptation to non-grid-based movement or gameplay. With that in mind, let's cover a few core concepts.
Article: Hexagonal Coordinates
by Blecki
This article describes how to use hexagonal coordinates and is provided with a sample project.
Hexagon Dimensions
Article : Multi-threading your XNA
by Catalin Zima
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. A Look at Multithreading Primitives
3. Multithreading Update/Draw
4. Example: Balls
5. Conclusions
6. Downloads
7. References