Article: Character Movement
by David Kendall
When development started on The Casino, a lot of things were implemented quickly to get the game to a playable state as soon as possible with the intention of coming back to these parts at a later point. In order to achieve character movement quickly, character movement that can be found in most XNA tutorials were added. This involved the character strafing and moving based upon the left thumbstick and rotation of the character based upon the right thumbstick.
This control scheme may seem familiar to some of you, and it should as it is reminiscent of the controls for a First Person Shooter (FPS). However, The Casino is in no way a FPS. In fact I don't know what you would classify it as. I also had an aim when designing the controls...to keep it simple. This was so players of all ages and skills could pick up and play the game as quickly as possible. This meant that the FPS control scheme had to go.
Article: Multiple columns with game state management
by Jeff Brown
This tutorial is based on the Game State Management (singleplayer games) from the xna website but the Network Game State Management (multiplayer games) can also be used based on your needs. There's no better place to start and I believe every game should incorporate one of the two. For this tutorial I'll be using the game state management but both should be nearly identical except for some multiplayer menus but those don't apply here.
This tutorial focuses on adding left and right movement to your menus so you can have multiple columns of menus.
NOTE: I have debug code in to modify the number of columns and number of menu entries in-game just to show how you can scale it very easily. You can download the project here to play with it. Left/right triggers add/remove menu entries and left/right shoulder buttons increase/decrease the number of columns.
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 
1 Day remaining
Quick reminder for our 'Absolutely Fine' XNA Tutorial Contest: The deadline is about 1 day away, so if you want to enter the contest, send us your entry!
At the moment, we have 4 published entries, and another around 14 entries that we're preparing for publishing.
Good luck!
Article: Programming your first XNA 4.0 game for PC, Xbox 360 & Windows Phone 7: Pong
by Thomas "Mister Helmut" Altenburger
I’d like to introduce the XNA framework to you with this very simple and straightforward tutorial. We will see what XNA is and how its basic features works to continue with the programming of your first game, a simple Pong clone for Windows. At last, we’ll try to convert it to the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. This tutorial assumes that the readers have a basic C#/.Net understanding. I hope that it will help you to understand the basics of the framework and that it will motivate you to go further in. The article should be suitable to complete beginners in game programming.
About this tutorial: I wrote this tutorial back in the days of XNA 2.0 beta and used it as an introductory course I taught to master degree students. Since then, it evolved to support XNA 4.0 beta with added Window Phone 7 development.
English not being my native language, please forgive and/or report any English oddities.
This tutorial targets XNA 4.0 beta. It will be updated when the final version will be released. It uses some new features of XNA 4.0 so it will not run out-of-the-box on previous XNA version (mainly due to the usage of Viewport.Bounds and changed SpriteBatch.Draw arguments order).
Contest deadline approaching!
Hi all,
Just a reminder that the deadline for our 'Absolutely Fine' XNA Tutorial Contest is closing in, and you have about 1 week to send your entries into the contest.
If you forgot the details of the contest, feel free to refresh your memory.
We're currently hard at work to get the rest of the entries online for your reading pleasure.
Good luck!
Article: Texture Modification using Render Targets, with some Stencil Buffer Action
by Dave Carlile
Sometimes you need to modify a texture while your game is running, and there are a number of ways to do this. One of the first things newer game programmers often try to do is use Texture2D.GetData to copy the texture data from the GPU to an array on the CPU, modify the bytes, and then send it back to the GPU with Texture2D.SetData.
This is a bad idea on many, levels. Beyond issues with pipeline stalls, GetData and SetData can be slow, especially when working with a large texture. Any time you’re tempted grab data from the GPU for use on the CPU you should very carefully consider all of your options. There are often other solutions that let you keep the data entirely on the GPU and accomplish the same thing.
This tutorial will use an example that could be solved with GetData and SetData, and show you another alternative using render targets and the stencil buffer that will let you perform the same function entirely on the GPU.