Silver Sprite 3.0 Alpha 2
Bill "Silent Assasin" Reiss has brought word of an Alpha 2 build of SilverSprite 3.0. You can grab the source and start playing with it right away
http://silversprite.codeplex.com/
SilverSprite enables you to get your XNA game working inside Silverlight with minimal fuss. It's worth checking out and if you're interested in Windows Phone 7 development, then this is an ideal starting point.
Here's a recent blog post discussing the Alpha in a little more detail. Read More
Article: Draw me a line (Zune HD)
by Sgt. Conker
This article will show you how to create a dotted line based on touch input from the Zune HD.
This can be very useful for indicating to the user a path a game entity is going to take.
If you've ever played Flight Control for the iPhone you'll know exactly what I mean.
Distance field based decal rendering
Rim van Wersch shares an XNA Framework implementation of the Valve paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects, presenting “[a] simple and efficient method […] which allows improved rendering of glyphs composed of curved and linear elements. A distance field is generated from a high resolution image, and then stored into a channel of a lower-resolution texture.”
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 2)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the second part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in adding our hero to the game, and have him interact with the platforms and blocks that make up the level.
External Happenings
Promit Roy shares a KISS way to serialize interfaces with the .NET serializers (with a bit more work it might even be possible to emit valid XML).
Nick Gravelyn scales retro sprites at build time with a KISS custom content importer.
And last but not least Stephen Styrchak found the code for his custom game template exporter and pushed it onto CodePlex.
HOWTO: Common Kanji Character Ranges
Renaud Bédard shares a way to define the Common Kanji Character Ranges for XNA SpriteFont Rendering, including a little tool to generate said ranges.
Nick’s Tile Engine Tutorials: The Playlist
Nick Gravelyn managed to upload his Tile Engine tutorials (in his own words: A bunch of older video tutorials I did for creating a tile engine using XNA Game Studio.
) to YouTube.
The Shawn: Why do 2D worlds make sense?
Shawn Hargreaves ponders the possible reasons why 2D games are still popular: “What makes less sense to me is why our brains are so much better at doing math and physics in 2D than 3D” and causes a discussion in the comments.
HOWTO: show drawing items with the mouse in XNA
Jakob Krarup answers an unidentified question in the XNA Community Forums about “how to give a player the possibility of adding things to a game, and storing the position of the added images”.
Display Orientation on the ZuneHD
John Sedlak has two posts about using his FGF framework while working on the Zune HD and dealing with orientation.
He talks about how to support rotating and resizing of the display on the Zune HD (which supports both landscape and portrait gaming) and then continues with more explanations.