Meanwhile, in Jim “So Evil That Even George Ducks and Covers” Perry-land the Overlocker himself continues to spam his blog. This time, he covers Spy Game Design – Multiplatform Issues/Capability and Spy Game Design – Character Training. Lets see if he can keep up the pace while The Hidden One continues to, well, hide.

• Spy Game Design – Agent Specialties
• Spy Game Design – Inventory and Related Areas
• Spy Game Design – Assignments/Missions
• Spy Game Design–Death
• Spy Game Design – Advancement
• Spy Game Design – Combat
• Spy Game Design – Identities

And, compared to the AppBuh Forums mess his forums are alive and kicking.

As you may or may not know (until now) a fellow XNA developer @DeathmatchGames and his family were victims of the May 22nd tornado that ravaged Joplin, MO. You can find extensive coverage of the tornado and the devestation [sic] it's caused at CNN.com, Google, and everywhere else.

Head over to the DeathmatchGames - Joplin Tornado Fund to read more and to learn about the ways to help.

This is a "hands on" hackathon where you will learn from Windows Phone 7, XNA and Azure experts how to build, scale and publish your Windows Phone 7 app or game. If you are just a beginner, or already have apps in the Marketplace this event will should not be missed. BYO Laptop!

RSVP early, space is limited to 300 attendees: http://bit.ly/RegWP7Hackathon [Ed.: The unshortened URL for the event details is here]

(YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A TECHED ATTENDEE TO COME TO THIS!)

Hopefully, in SharpDX unlike any other DirectX .NET APIs, this code has been written to be consistent over the whole generated code, and was carefully designed to be quite efficient… but still, It has obviously a cost, and we need to know it!

Spoiler: The offerings Microsoft has in store are, by far, slower than SlimDX/SharpDX.

In other news: There is a thread over in the AppBuhAppHub forums praising the XNA MVPs. We here in the barracks fully support that effort – mostly due to the fact that Captain ZSquare has access to various arms here and we lost the keys to lock up the arsenal… – so you might head over to add to the +1 (none of the Google +1 stuff) choir.

Go ahead and read it now.

First, there’s Michael B. “Concise” McLaughlin of Bob Taco Industries fame. Expect even more words coming from this man and his blog (and now his forums).

Next up comes the John “The Pale Impaled” Defenbaugh, joining Jim “The Closer” Perry, armed with his shut gunshotgun the threads will fall left and right like clay pigeons. Luckily he still ain’t havin’ the permissions.

The third one is MIA currently… [Update: OK, our intelligentintelligence services managed to get ahold of his name now, Dr. Minh-Triet TRAN, but not many more details…]

Lets hope thisthese guys can fulfill the demands of the community…

[Update: Moo]

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

To summarize:

• You can now mark an entire forum as "read" so that you can easily read new posts when they arrive.
• Education Catalog classifications have been updated
• Sales data pipeline improvements have been made so that erroneous data will no longer be shown to creators
  • (Note that feed is separate from Top Download list freeze issues, they seem related but aren't)
  • (Also note that sales data still may occasionally be delayed due to ongoing system maintenance)
• Fixes to improve membership sign-up scenarios
• Fixes to improve the readability of the Japanese site.
• The site can also now be updated with security patches and fixes without requiring lengthy downtime

Kudos to the engineering team for doing these and communicating them to us.