Catalin on 2D Skeletal Animations
Catalin “Too Proud To Self-promote” Zima (you might know him as our local XNA MVP Captain ZSquare) has a nice write-up of 2D Skeletal Animations over at his blog. So, if you ever wondered what the benefits of skeletal animations in the 2D world as compared to our beloved sprite sheets are, his post would be your starting point to explore this very topic.
High End Performance Optimizations on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7
Ian Nicolades
Technical Director, UberGeekGames
For the Xbox or Windows Phone 7 programmer, performance is something that should always be kept in mind. For any moderately complex game, it can be very easy for framerate issues to crop up, and seeing as those pesky gamers insist on having a smooth playing experience, it can quickly become problematic.
Having had quite a bit of experience in this area with our last few games, this article will be a “missing manual” of sorts; the kind of cheat sheet that would have saved me more than one headache! 
Hiding a Clingerman to Talk Natively
In Benchmarking C#/.Net Direct3D 11 APIs vs native C++ (a post from March 14, I wonder why I did not share this already…) Alexandre Mutel explores the cost of calling native APIs from managed code (AKA interop) via micro benchmarking various managed Direct3D 11 APIs. He does this because:
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.
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
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!
”
Nuclex Framework, Community Character Voting and Morph Targets
Markus “Cygon4” Ewald announces the immediate availability of an intermediate release of his Nuclex Framework, adding: “There are still outstanding issues, but the previous release is already getting a beard and I'm getting reports for issues already solved
”
Amit Ginni Patpatia of FatCow Games AS fame reminds the community to vote for a character for an upcoming game.
Last but not least Barnaby Smith pokes me about an XNA 3.1 Morph Target implementation he put online: “This example uses multiple vertex streams and blends between them using a vertex shader. This approach is a differing method to CPU or VTF based implementations and does not require the calculation of vertex textures, making it quite simple and straightforward.
”
A New Book on the Block and A New Natur Beta
Sez the Chris G. Williams about the fruits of his collaboration with George W. Clingerman:
Weighing in at 552 pages and featuring a foreward [
sicObs.] by the legendary James Silva (Ska Studios, creator of The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, I MAED A GAME W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1, and more...) this book gives thorough coverage of XNA 4.0 as it relates to Windows Phone 7.
Continue reading more at Professional Windows Phone 7 Game Development: Creating Games using XNA Game Studio 4 (named in true Microsoft style and spirit…)
Via the forums comes the word that a new beta release of Natur is available. You do not know what Natur is? Well, neither do I so here’s the blurb from CodePlex:
Natur allows you to easily create and manage maps in 3D using the Xna framework. As you build your map, you can enter simulation mode at any time; this will activate bounds, physics, and any game logic such as animations and triggers. The following are currently supported:
- Animations
- Bounding Systems
- Interactive Objects
- Lighting
- Locations
- Physic Simulation
- Spawn Points
- Texture Palettes
- Triggers
Dedication for Captain boki
And here's the screenshots for Captain boki
Best wishes,
Captain ZSquare