Jemgine Editor Alpha
Mr "I don't provide screenshots" Blecki has announced an updated build of his Jemgine map editor.
Some key points he makes.
- A 2d platformer engine with 'advanced physics'.
- A feature-rich editor (That one up there!)
- A single-player 'test game' to use as a base and guide for the engine.
- My eternal love and support.
More details here
Light Pre-Pass
Michael Quandt has posted a write up detailing the theory behind his Light Pre-Pass code he released for educational use previously.
More on XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone Support
Says the Klucher through the tweets of The Shawn:
Demo [Harvest, developed by Luma Arcade] looks awesome, full 3D, animating characters. More will be shown at MIX next week.
The game loop on the phone is similar to existing platforms, but tweaked for power efficiency.
The phone graphics is an evolution of the existing immediate mode rendering API, 2D and 3D:
- New configurable effects: BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, AlphaTestEffect
- Custom programmable shaders are not supported on the phone
- Image scaler:
- lets you render to any size backbuffer, and have this automatically scaled to fill the screen
- lets the same game run on both 800x480 and 480x320 display sizes without special coding
- provides automatic rotation to support portrait, landscape left, and landscape right modes
- the image scaler is free: it uses dedicated hardware so does not consume any GPU
Portability: the ability to target three screens. Portability lets you target more sockets with a smaller time investment. Portability is not just about the same game running on different platforms, it is also valuable to share infrastructure, knowledge, etc.
Framework feature profiles:
- Reach: broad base of devices including phones
- HiDef: Windows and Xbox only
“Focus on being a game developer, not plumbing the underlying technology”
“Michael Klucher plugs forums.xna.com, says our MVP's are awesome and do a great job answering questions.”
“Michael Klucher gets applause!”
The will be more talk about the Marketplace and the Windows Phone emulator at the MIX next week.
XACT is part of the HiDef feature profile, so not on the phone: use SoundEffect (+ 4.0 enhancements) on the phone.
Ozymandias has an article about how to get in touch with Microsoft to get access to Xbox LIVE on the phone.
Update (2010-03-11 02:31 GMT): The Shawn has another blog post up, high-level-detailing some Windows Phone support related work done.
XNA Game Studio 4.0!
…will be
- Hardware accelerated 3D API’s on Windows Phone 7 Series [Ed. notice the lack of Zune HD in there…]
- Visual Studio 2010 integration with our toolset [Ed. what a surprise…]
- Added buffered audio support to the Audio API’s [Ed. could be interesting…]
Update: Michael Klucher has a somewhat more wordy version up on his blog. From what it seems:
- Xbox LIVE API on Windows Phone 7 Series seems to be available to Xbox LIVE partners only (did anyone actually expect it to be open to everyone?)
- The dead born Zune and Zune HD support will stay in XNA GS 3.1 (R.I.P.)
- The buffered audio support is said to have been requested by lots of users; I wonder if that means runtime writable buffers…
Update 2: The GDC 2010 press release is on the XNA Creators Club Online site now.
Update 3: …which seems to indicate that XNA Game Studio 4.0 is for Windows Phone 7 Series only? Oh Microsoft, if someone really can confuse its customers than it is you…
Update 4: …but that seems to be Very Bad Wording (in the FAQ) only.
Update 5: The Shawn to the rescue with some more details:
- New platform
- Windows Phone 7 Series
- New features
- Integrates with Visual Studio 2010
- Dynamic audio output [Ed. Hui]
- Microphone input [Ed. necessary for the phone side of things, eh?]
- BasicEffect has four new siblings [Ed. or the mutant samples]
- SkinnedEffect
- EnvironmentMapEffect
- DualTextureEffect
- AlphaTestEffect
- Improved portability and usability
- Collapsed graphics caps into just two profile levels: Reach and HiDef [Ed. that’s nice]
- Many graphics API improvements [Ed. We demand details!]
- This involves some breaking API changes [Ed. We do not care (too much) about that!]
- Split Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll into several assemblies, to make it more obvious which pieces are available on each platform [Ed. this could be a bit of a concern]
Update 6: I might as well add some tidbits about the marketplace to come:
Windows® Phone Marketplace hub: But we also remain committed to independent developers. Windows Phone 7 Series includes the Windows® Phone Marketplace hub, where apps and games will be sold. Both independent and professional developers can offer games as apps via Marketplace, giving consumers a wide array of games to choose from. Charlie Kindle, the partner group program manager for Windows Phone 7 Series, talked a little more about this in a blog post last week.
Update 7: How could I even forgot to share the release date? “XNA Game Studio 4.0 will be available in the coming month, so get ready to jump on board!” (quoted from the press release)
Silver Sprite 3.0 Alpha 2
Bill "Silent Assasin" Reiss has brought word of an Alpha 2 build of SilverSprite 3.0. You can grab the source and start playing with it right away
http://silversprite.codeplex.com/
SilverSprite enables you to get your XNA game working inside Silverlight with minimal fuss. It's worth checking out and if you're interested in Windows Phone 7 development, then this is an ideal starting point.
Here's a recent blog post discussing the Alpha in a little more detail. Read More
KiloWatt Animation for XNA
Jwatte has tweeted news prediction of a new version of his KiloWatt animation library and Pre-release bits are here.
"This is the third-and-a-half release of the KiloWatt Animation library. It is intended as a companion to the kW X-port 3ds Max X file exporter, to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. This release is for version 3.0/3.1 for Windows and Xbox 360. Sorry, no Zune support 
"
He goes on to explain how this is different to the XNA Skinning sample on the creators website
The KiloWatt Animation Library is different from the XNA Skinning sample code in several ways, including:
- KiloWatt Animation stores animation keyframes as position, rotation and scale (for a total of 10 floats), instead of the full matrix used by the Animation Components.
- KiloWatt Animation removes unnecessary keyframes (down to a tolerance that you can specify), for a usually quite significant savings in file size.
- KiloWatt Animation does interpolation between animation keyframes using quaternions, which means that slow-motion and varispeed playback will still look smooth.
- KiloWatt Animation supports composition (blending) of animations to generate the final output pose for a given Model.
- KiloWatt Animation replaces the Effect used for your Model only when you tell it to.
- KiloWatt Animation does not make any specific demands of your geometry; you can (and should) use it to animate rigid objects such as windmills, catapults etc. in addition to skinned meshes.
Article: Draw me a line (Zune HD)
by Sgt. Conker
This article will show you how to create a dotted line based on touch input from the Zune HD.
This can be very useful for indicating to the user a path a game entity is going to take.
If you've ever played Flight Control for the iPhone you'll know exactly what I mean.
Would you like George’s input?
Well, not George's input, but yours! George's new sample demonstrates a wrapper around input that you can easily use in your games.
And while you're there, you can give him some feedback, because he always appreciates it, and would like to know what he can do to help everyone. Because he's the "good" MVP, apparently
And btw, for those that came back from Mars recently, George is THE MAN behind XNADevelopment.com, a great site for beginner tutorials that are well written and easy to follow.
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.
It’s Official, XNA & WP7 are set to get it on!!
Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for.
Over the past few weeks I'm sure you've all heard about the "leak" of documentation that was supposedly showing the use of XNA and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.
Well now, it's official!!
Windows Phone 7 WILL support XNA and not only that it will also support the use of Silverlight for Apps & Games.
Our favourite Mr Klucher posts his snippet http://klucher.com/blog/gaming-development-for-the-go/
And the The Special One finally prevents himself from imploding by spilling some beans here http://twitter.com/shawnhargreaves/status/10014398597
There's still very little details on what exactly will be available to us.
Will we have avatars? will he even have 3D or will it be the same mediocre support that we have for the Zune HD. Will it even matter? Will there be a marketplace for you to develop for ? All that should be revealed at MIX and beyond but for now, get writing some Windows Phone 7 games. You can bet a $ anything that works on Zune HD will require very little changes to work on WP7.
Silverlight is also very interesting, knocking up high quality applications will be a breeze.
Stay tuned for more details as they come in... Exciting times ahead.
[EDIT : Added link source] : http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/04/microsoft-talks-windows-phone-7-series-development-ahead-of-gdc/