Indiefreaks Game Framework 0.1.0.0 released
This just in!
Philippe Da Silva announced the availability of the Indifreaks Game Framework, v 0.1.0.0
The Indiefreaks Game Framework is a set of .Net libraries compiling a few years of experimenting and prototyping design patterns developing games for Microsoft Xna Framework using the SynapseGaming SunBurn graphics engine.
The goal here is to share with the community what I consider as best practices so they can avoid going through the same steps as I did. The Indiefreaks Game Framework is totally free (like in free beer) to use but it still requires you to acquire a SunBurn engine license.
Looking at the framework's official page, you can see some pretty interesting stuff that's in the framework, including
- Smart Content Management
- Smart Input Management
- Cameras
- Alpha Blended Rendering
Go and take a look for yourself.
News from nuclex.org
Here's a couple of news from nuclex.org.
A new tutorial for Synapse Gaming's SunBurn engine demonstrating how SunBurn (and XNA) can be used in a dependency injection environment, a programming technique in which components are wired up to each automatically based on predefined bindings. Read more.
Cygon explains why he has chosen to reimplement XNA's GameComponent/DrawableGameComponent classes himself and how he's improved his design to cover environments where the game renders into a scene graph instead of directly using the graphics device. Read more.
Cygon is talking about a redesign of the event-based input handling system used by the GUI in his Nuclex Framework. Read more.
Enjoy!
Article: Input Playback
by Jesse Chounard
Lately I’ve noticed a trend in games to allow players to save and play back recordings of their play upon completion of a match. This allows players to analyze their mistakes, as well as learn new tactics and techniques from their opponents. This feature is becoming common in all sorts of games. You can find it in real time strategy games like StarCraft, first person shooters like Halo 3, and fighting games like Super Street Fighter 4.
In many cases, these gameplay recordings are often uploaded to a server on the internet, and are available for download by anyone. The recordings don’t require buffering or waiting for a big download to finish. Instead, the playback just starts right up. How is this possible? Great looking high definition video files are gigantic. Also, video compression takes a huge amount of computation, so wouldn’t it slow the gameplay down to record everything?
It turns out that there’s a really simple trick. We’re not recording video. Instead, we just store all of the user input, and then later we can use those inputs to exactly recreate the gameplay in our game engine. So while it looks like we’re watching a stored video, instead we’re just watching the computer playing the game using our stored inputs instead of using the game controller for input.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you a simple method that you can use to achieve gameplay recording and playback, and also list a few other uses for this technique.
Would you like George’s input?
Well, not George's input, but yours! George's new sample demonstrates a wrapper around input that you can easily use in your games.
And while you're there, you can give him some feedback, because he always appreciates it, and would like to know what he can do to help everyone. Because he's the "good" MVP, apparently 
And btw, for those that came back from Mars recently, George is THE MAN behind XNADevelopment.com, a great site for beginner tutorials that are well written and easy to follow.
Performance Testing, Gesture Recognition and Template Exporter
Kris Steele talks about his experience with performance testing while developing his XNA Game.
The new version of FGF (0.1.2.0) was released, and contains Gesture Recognition capabilities. Read all about them on John Sedlak's site.
Stephen Styrchak posted the source code to his Template Exporter on codeplex, and then posted an explanation about what StartupObject is and how it should be handled when exporting project templates.
FGF 0.1.2.0 Released
Now with gesture recognition! And if you have to ask what FGF actually is: It’s the love child of John “Wild Gestures” Sedlak and expands to Focused Games Framework.
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”.
Names Actions Sample
Michael Quandt posted a new sample a new sample on his site, showing how to "create named actions which support the GamePad, Keyboard and Mouse".
Go read his explanations and download it to see if it could be useful for your own games.
Extending the GamePadState
Ever wished there was an easier way to test if one of a set of buttons are pressed on a gamepad instead of writing a very long if statement?
Nick "Don't call me 'I do too much' anymore!" Gravelyn shows how you can do exactly that in his new post called Extending GamePadState.