Sgt. Conker » News

Recommendations on Resuming

Captain ZSquare — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:14:37 +0000

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.

App Hub Fixes brought to you by Microsoft

Captain ZSquare — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 10:39:10 +0000

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

Captain ZSquare — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:14:52 +0000

Michael B. McLaughlin's had quite a few interesting posts in the last month, so here we are, recapping them for your reading pleasure:

There they are. Goldmine of information!

Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0

Captain ZSquare — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:17:24 +0000

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.

Also, here's a video demonstrating the Hardware Instancing feature.

Dedication for Captain boki

Captain ZSquare — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:13:27 +0000

And here's the screenshots for Captain boki

Best wishes,

Captain ZSquare

XNA 4.0 Light Pre-Pass

Captain ZSquare — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:08:38 +0000

Jorge Coluna posted an article on his site about implementing the Light Pre-Pass technique for rendering in XNA 4.0

Read all about it here.

Indiefreaks Game Framework 0.1.0.0 released

Captain ZSquare — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 20:13:53 +0000

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.

XBuilder v0.2 released a while ago

Captain ZSquare — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:46:51 +0000

My timing is extremely bad, but I finally managed to get this info out here.

Version 0.2 of XBuilder, made by Tim Jones, is now available. For those who wonder, Xbuilder is "an extension for Visual Studio 2010 which lets you preview your XNA assets (models, effects and textures) right inside Visual Studio.".

You can read the announcement for v0.2 here.

XNA 3.1 to 4.0 Cheat Sheet

Captain ZSquare — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:49:41 +0000

The cheat sheet can be found here, and it contains a comprehensive guide to converting your 3.1 game to 4.0.

Fonts and Animations

Captain ZSquare — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:20:37 +0000

Markus Ewald shows off his custom way of handling fonts in XNA 4.0 with the purpose of increasing quality.

XNA Sprite Font Quality

Alexandru-Cristian Popescu share and Animation Library for XNA 4.0, and also a Library to read DDS files from a file.

Animation Library