Things go wrong! and now the news.

Recently the Sgt. Conker server had a bit of a hiccup, our e-mails were getting clogged up and we missed a few things.

No major damage was done, and no soldiers were harmed in this unfortunate outbreak.

And now the news.

George continues his onslaught of posting all things XNA News by bringing you XNA Notes 012.

Ploobs Game Engine - another open source XNA Engine. The engine boasts a huge list of features which you can see just under the screenshots on the codeplex page.
Unfortunately it’s for XNA 3.1, but it looks pretty, and hopefully wouldn’t take much to upgrade to XNA 4.0. Thanks go to Thiago Dias Pastor for bringing this to our attention. He also made me aware of a downloadable document here which is an extensive explanation of the techniques used in the engine. Unfortunately it’s in Portuguese which limits the audience some what.

Optimizing Bounding Boxes in XNA – Robert Walter brings a decent article on how to optimize bounding box collisions in XNA.

Tower Defense Tutorials -  This website has 14.5 articles on how to build an XNA Tower Defense game. Looks like a nice resource.

Neoforce controls – This is something I completely missed. A skinnable GUI library for XNA 4. Looks stunning, possibly a bit overkill but still … worth a try at least.
Disclaimer : this project is no longer maintained or developed (but it’s open source)

And lastly, some support for a very cool XNA engine.

SunBurn Game Engine is looking HOT! – Here’s some news from the Synapse Gaming team.

SunBurn Game Engine: Full Windows Phone 7 Support

Synapse Gaming’s SunBurn Game Engine has led the pack when it comes to technology for XNA. And our latest SunBurn update solidifies that commitment with full support for Windows Phone 7.

This is not some add-on or a small subset of the engine. Instead it includes all of the features and systems the hardware is capable of supporting, and using the same api, content pipeline, and design as on Windows and Xbox. This allows a game to run across all three platforms without any modifications, while still being able to take advantage of SunBurn's advanced features like deferred rendering, HDR, and more on Windows and Xbox.

Windows Phone 7 features in SunBurn include:

• Diffuse and emissive mapping
• Volume lighting
• Bloom / post-processing
• Baked-down lighting on static objects (see below)
• Composite lighting on dynamic objects (see below)
• Collisions
• Use the same scenes, light rigs, code, tools, and api on Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone 7

SunBurn 2.0 also includes in-editor baked-down lighting, which generates light maps that render with none of the overhead of the real-time lighting (rendering nearly for free). This makes highly detailed lighting and shadows possible on Windows Phone 7 (which does not support dynamic lighting and shadows).

To learn more, and see SunBurn WP7 games and demos in action, go to http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2010/11/16/sunburn-2-0-goes-mobile-on-windows-phone-7.aspx