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…
Posts from people working on the XNA team
Here's a list of interesting stuff posted this week by people working on our beloved XNA!
Shawn Hargreaves:
- Efficiently loading large arrays or lists
- Serializing collections of shared resources, part 2
- Iterator state machines
Shawn Hargreaves and Charles Cox Talk XNA Game Studio on Channel 9
Aaron Stebner:
- Configuring and testing icon images in XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone games
- What XNA Game Studio 4.0 functionality works in what version of Visual Studio and on what version of Windows
- Steps to upgrade an XACT project so it can be used with XNA Game Studio 4.0
Michael Klucher:
Nick Gravelyn:
- My AppWeek 2010
- Batch your polygons
- Don’t reinvent those wheels
- Don’t build more than what you need
- The delights of DualTextureEffect
XNA Creator's Club Online:
Nick Gravelyn’s Alien Aggressors Tutorial
Nick Gravelyn (no introduction needed) has been kind enough to send us his Alien Aggressors tutorial (for XNA Game Studio 2.0) and allow us to share it with the world.
You can get the tutorial here: AlienAggressors.pdf
And you might also need the AlienAggressorsContent.zip pack of content to be used with the tutorial.
P.S. This article first appeared on Ziggyware (now defunct) a while ago.
Storage in XNA Game Studio 4.0
Nick Gravelyn has a new blog post explaining the changes made to the Storage system in XNA 4.0
Report on Nick
Nick Gravelyn still seems to have too much time on his hand, because he keeps churning out stuff on his blog:
First he talks about resizing 2D arrays;
Then he comes back and craetes more extension methods for arrays;
Then he gives up on creating his own editor, and teaches us how to be lazy, like him.
Curious Nick Yields
Nick Gravelyn learns about the yield keyword and uses the new discovery to show how to implemented a simple script engine. Crazy voodoo indeed.
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.
Multi-News
Today we have a treat. More news than you can shake a stick at.
Nick "140 chars just aint enough" Gravelyn posts another update to his shader toy along with some thoughts on making UI development more generic.
http://nickgravelyn.com/2010/02/default-parameter-saving-in-shader-toy/
http://nickgravelyn.com/2010/02/shader-toy-parameters-and-annotations/
http://nickgravelyn.com/2010/02/generic-ui-for-parameter-editing/
Kris Steele writes about a good use for the old favourite High Score Component
http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=203
2D vs 3D... Shawn Hargreaves keeps the fire burning in this epic battle of dimensions
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2010/02/08/comments-on-2d-vs-3d.aspx
Tom Looman wrote a blog post about his new engine for XNA called Gizmo. He's released a beta version up on Codeplex
http://coreenginedev.blogspot.com/2010/02/xna-gizmo-released.html
Pong in F#
Former MVP, currently XNA Team Member, Nick Gravelyn talks about how he made Pong using F#. Not my cup of tea, but still might be an interesting read for some people.
Back from holidays. News Recap
Hi all!
I'm back from my holidays, so here's a list of news from the XNA world that stacked up, and you might have missed:
Nuclex welcomes us to the first part of his XNA Game Archtiecture Series, where he talks about his proposed development tree and third party libraries.
The series of Free Game Assets continues with a new free pack of Planet Sprites and Textures.
Innovative Game's "Game Engine Tutorial" continues with a new part about the Content Manager.
Shawn Hargreaves has two very enlightening posts the you should definitely read. This first is "Bug or Feature" talking about a bug in Extreme G that was seen as a feature by reviewers. The second one talks about AI Coordinate Systems, as used in Moto GP.
Finally, Nick Gravelyn posted some tweaks to his Interpolators.