Ignoring a Hidden Clingerman to Visit Germany
Looks like there were a new addition to the league of XNA/DirectX (didn’t that read DirectX/XNA once?) MVPs: the German Roland “Glatzemann” Rosenkranz, who is running amokcausing havockeeping posting on the XNA.mag and our beloved AppBuh forums. Congratulations, chap!
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.
The Joplin Tornado Fund for DeathmatchGames
Via The Dead Pixel Society comes the word about the impact of the Joplin Tornado on the XNA community:
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.
Windows Phone 7 Unleashed Hackathon
Via Chris G. Williams comes the word of an upcoming Windows Phone 7 hackathon in Atlanta, Georgia. Quotes the Chris:
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!)
Recommendations on Resuming
Coming hot from the freshly-awarded MVP Michael B. McLaughlin, a set of no less than eight (8= 2*4 = 3+5 = 10-2) tips to improve the experience of users when they need to close and resume your XNA game on Windows Phone 7. The article is a must read for everyone who doesn't want to annoy their customers.
Go ahead and read it now.
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
App Hub Fixes brought to you by Microsoft
And the news is brought to you by George, in this forum thread.
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.
Recap of mikebmcl’s posts
Michael B. McLaughlin's had quite a few interesting posts in the last month, so here we are, recapping them for your reading pleasure:
- List of Commonly Used Value-Types in XNA Games
- XNA RenderTarget2D Sample
- ANTS Memory Profiler 7 Review
- CheckMemoryAllocationGame Sample
- Tips for XNA WP7 Developers
There they are. Goldmine of information!
Posting a Clingerman to Stay Relevant
Due to the lack of updates recently we’re going to do an XNA Notes inspired round up on this very Monday, and we also like to post a photo of the original author of the XNA Notes to shout yet another Vote for George!
With that out of the way here are the nominations for next Friday’s XNA Notes (in no particular order):
Jim “Still Not Evil” Perry shares an updated XNA 4.0 for Windows version of the Game State Manager sample.
Nick “MVP” Gravelyn breaks the word about a “solid way to handle trial [Ed.: not trail, as initially stated] mode on the Windows Phone 7” written by Dean Johnson.
There’s a new Ad SDK for XNA on Windows Phone 7 in town, seeking help for a very closed beta.
And last but not least, Jason Swearingen still participates in the #AltDevBlogADay, this time covering Spatial Partitioning. Part 1: Survey of spatial partitioning solutions.
A closing paragraph with the sole reason to have the text flow below the photo and bear no real content. The same can be said about this link to The ZBuffer. However, this The cake is a lie does have a meaning…
Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0
Philippe just let us know about the release of v0.2.0.0 of the Indiefreaks Game Framework.
You can read the full details about this release here.
Fishing Girl Did Not Sell a Single Copy!
Well, no single copy on a single day that is. So why this is news? According to a forum post Eric Woroshow promised himself to release the source. “So you can now grab the code for the game and the code for the library from my public Mercurial repositories. It certainly is not the best code I have ever written (far from it!), but nevertheless it does have it moments of clarity and elegance and I hope it proves useful and interesting for the community. Enjoy!
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