No major damage was done, and no soldiers were harmed in this unfortunate outbreak.

And now the news.

George continues his onslaught of posting all things XNA News by bringing you XNA Notes 012.

Ploobs Game Engine - another open source XNA Engine. The engine boasts a huge list of features which you can see just under the screenshots on the codeplex page.
Unfortunately it’s for XNA 3.1, but it looks pretty, and hopefully wouldn’t take much to upgrade to XNA 4.0. Thanks go to Thiago Dias Pastor for bringing this to our attention. He also made me aware of a downloadable document here which is an extensive explanation of the techniques used in the engine. Unfortunately it’s in Portuguese which limits the audience some what.

Optimizing Bounding Boxes in XNA – Robert Walter brings a decent article on how to optimize bounding box collisions in XNA.

Tower Defense Tutorials -  This website has 14.5 articles on how to build an XNA Tower Defense game. Looks like a nice resource.

Neoforce controls – This is something I completely missed. A skinnable GUI library for XNA 4. Looks stunning, possibly a bit overkill but still … worth a try at least.
Disclaimer : this project is no longer maintained or developed (but it’s open source)

And lastly, some support for a very cool XNA engine.

SunBurn Game Engine is looking HOT! – Here’s some news from the Synapse Gaming team.

SunBurn Game Engine: Full Windows Phone 7 Support

Synapse Gaming’s SunBurn Game Engine has led the pack when it comes to technology for XNA. And our latest SunBurn update solidifies that commitment with full support for Windows Phone 7.

This is not some add-on or a small subset of the engine. Instead it includes all of the features and systems the hardware is capable of supporting, and using the same api, content pipeline, and design as on Windows and Xbox. This allows a game to run across all three platforms without any modifications, while still being able to take advantage of SunBurn's advanced features like deferred rendering, HDR, and more on Windows and Xbox.

Windows Phone 7 features in SunBurn include:

• Diffuse and emissive mapping
• Volume lighting
• Bloom / post-processing
• Baked-down lighting on static objects (see below)
• Composite lighting on dynamic objects (see below)
• Collisions
• Use the same scenes, light rigs, code, tools, and api on Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone 7

SunBurn 2.0 also includes in-editor baked-down lighting, which generates light maps that render with none of the overhead of the real-time lighting (rendering nearly for free). This makes highly detailed lighting and shadows possible on Windows Phone 7 (which does not support dynamic lighting and shadows).

To learn more, and see SunBurn WP7 games and demos in action, go to http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2010/11/16/sunburn-2-0-goes-mobile-on-windows-phone-7.aspx

You can read the full details about this release here.

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.

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!

sgMotion is an animation library (based on XNAnimation by Bruno Evangelista) and provides full integration with both the Sunburn Engine and the Sunburn Framework.

More at the source.

The SunBurn Framework contains a subset of the great SunBurn Engine, and you can use it to learn, improve your XNA games, or evaluate the API to see if the Engine would suit your needs. You can get started now by downloading it here.

Other SunBurn goodies:

• Ultrahead's SunBurn tutorials: Part 1 and Part 2
• Nick Gravelyn's introduction to SunBurn: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Adding Physics, Using split-screen.
• Matt Bettcher's 3D Primitives with LOD
• Tom's Game State Management with SunBurn

Nick "I do too much, but still can't stop" Gravelyn continues his series about using Sunburn with a new tutorial, where he shows us how to enable Split Screen when using the Sunburn rendering engine. Go take a look at it and grab the source here.

He's also asking about future stuff to do with Sunburn, so if you want to see anything in particular, let him know!