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.
”
Fonts and Animations
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
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!
Nuclex continues the Game Architecture Series
Nuclex brings the second part of the ongoing Game Architecture Series, and covers some Object Oriented Programming Concepts.
The next entry in the series also promises to be interesting, and will be about Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control.
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.
Game Architecture Series
Markus Ewalds of Nuclex promises a series of articles about designing a game and it's architecture. I'm curious to see what he has in store for us, and hope the series will be an interesting one. Read the announcement on his site.
100% Test Coverage
After Markus made flashy statements about having "100% Test Coverage" on his new release of Nuclex, he posted an explanation about what that means exactly, which should help us mere mortals understand it better. Read more on his site.
Nuclex Framework Updated
In Nuclex Framework R984 Released! Markus “Cygon” Ewald announces the immediate availability of the latest version of the Nuclex Framework on CodePlex. Highlights include:
- 100% test coverage of the GUI library (I leave it to the educated reader to determine if that means anything useful)
- Control navigation with the game pad and cursor keys
- The GUI library contains controls for buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, horizontal and vertical scroll bars, text boxes, lists now