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:
Links, links, links!
We'll start with NemoKrad's BoundingBoxes in XNA 4.0
Next, Stephen Styrchak talks about Debugging the XNA Content Pipeline with C# Express Edition and a bug-fix for Debugging Xbox 360 Content
Bob Taco Industries has two blog posts, one about Turning a Solution into a Template for XNA 4.0 and one about Sizing Apps and Games Properly Using the WP7 Emulator
Xna Creator's Club Online released some new samples for Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio 4.0
And Shawn explains the new Dual Texture Effect
Using PIX with XNA Game Studio 4.0
If you ever wanted to use PIX in XNA Game Studio 4.0 and faced issues, Shawn comes to the rescue showing us how to do that.
Not so Breaking News
…anymore anyway as even the sleepiest, under a rock living member of the XNA community will already know that our beloved local MVP extraordinary Catalin Zima got married the last weekend. Although life in the barracks is still on halt due to the impact of the party (albeit of the virtual form only) we like to share our congratulations with Catalin. So, here it comes: Congratulations, dude! (spectacular, ain’t it?)
In related news: Shawn Hargreaves put a ring on it (the ring finger), too, so we use this opportunity to also congratulate The Shawn!
P.S.: We place our bets on Andy Dunn to be the next to take the chance…
Recent News : XNA Still exists!
We think everyone must be busy playing with XNA 4 and WP7 tools as we're very light on news recently.
Here's a short brief round-up of some of the things we've heard about on the grapevine.
Mr "I don't provide screenshots" Blecki has released an Alpha 3 version of Jemgine. I here and now request that this gets published to codeplex so it's easier for interested parties to keep up to date.
There's also a pretty cool video of his engine in action.
Shawn "The Prophet" Hargreaves keeps us refreshed on changes in XNA 4.0 with this goodbye to ElapsedRealTime and TotalRealTime. Take a read here
Jeromy "No Nickname" Walsh has launched a new website relating to game development called GameDevelopedia.com. He's just published his first for the site. First of many let's hope. Check it out here
Heard about VS2010 RTM ? Never mind. It's not officially supported with the Windows Phone 7 tools. My advice would be to ignore it for now until there is an update to the Windows Phone tools. Here's some more details on that story
Another interesting WP7 related post on the official dev blog.
Automatic Rotation Support or Automatic Multi-Orientation Layout Support for Windows Phone
State objects, disco lights and shining Sun
In case you just came from the Moon into XNA land and you aren't following his blog, you should know that Shawn Hargreaves is upon us again with a detailed explanation about the new State Objects introduced into the XNA Framework 4.0 to simplify working with render states.
Next, you can go and download the source for Adventures of Disco Man, and example application made by Petri at "The Gathering 2010" .
Finally, Nemo Krad just teases us with endless nice-looking videos for which he releases no source code 
RIP Point Sprites, We Hardly Knew Thou
The Shawn posted an obituary to (for?) the point sprites, explaining the reasoning behind their removal from the XNA Framework 4.0. Also, he shares 360 performance details of the alternatives, indicating that there is no real penalty to be paid.
If you break it, break it good. XNA 4 Breaking changes.
Shawn has written about the breaking changes in XNA 4.0. He brushes over a brief history lesson of XNA which sets up the scene to talk about the breaking changes that XNA 4.0 brings to developers.
Read the full post here
"I’ll be writing more about these changes and the reasons behind them over the coming weeks, but here is a quick summary of the more significant breaking changes:
- Replaced StorageContainer.TitleLocation with a new OpenStream API
- Replaced individual graphics renderstates with a new state objects API
- Premultiplied alpha is now enabled by default
- Made it easier to use SpriteBatch with custom renderstates and custom shaders
- No more SpriteBatch vertex shader magic, so you can easily position SpriteBatch text in a 3D world using BasicEffect
- Vertex buffers are now strongly typed, each one having an associated VertexDeclaration
- You no longer need to specify a VertexDeclaration before drawing, because this is implicit in your choice of vertex buffer
- Vertex buffer sizes are now specified as number of vertices rather than bytes
- Replaced GraphicsDevice.Vertices with a new SetVertexBuffer API
- Each rendertarget now has an associated depth buffer: no more DepthStencilBuffer type
- RenderTarget2D now inherits Texture2D: no more GetTexture method
- SetRenderTarget atomically sets all rendertargets, rather than changing just one layer
- Replaced Effect.Begin and End with a new EffectPass.Apply method
- Removed the low level shader APIs (VertexShader, PixelShader, Set*ShaderConstant)
- Removed EffectPool, StateBlock, GammaRamp, ClipPlane
- Removed triangle fans
- Removed point sprites
- Changed the Color type from BGRA to RGBA byte ordering"
The Shawn: Math in 2D vs. 3D
Continuing his quest of pouring fuel to the fire The Shawn didn’t start he now writes about Doing math in 2D vs. 3D while teasing at an upcoming vector math post.