VISUAL3D.NET BETA 1 EVALUATION GUIDELINES

Realmware Corp. has recently released the "Guidelines for Evaluating Visual3D.NET Beta 1".

From the guidelines: "... In order to make your evaluation a positive experience that helps us better Visual3D.NET and ensures you have the information you need work through crucial issues we ask you to adhere to the following guidlines during your evaluation of Visual3D.NET ...".

If you are a betatester, you should have already read them or be reading them right now.

"EXTENDING THE BITMAP FONT MAKER UTILITY"

There's an interesting article available at Ziggyware -"Extending the Bitmap Font Maker Utility", which explains how to add more image extensions to the tool recently released by the XNA Team for the creation of bitmap fonts.

From Ziggy's article: "... Extending the Bitmap Font Maker Utility to support multiple file formats is a very easy task since the .NET System.Drawing.Bitmap class wich the font utility uses to write its output with already supports several file formats via the System.Drawing.Image base class ... I have chosen to implement bmp, jpg, png and tiff ...".

Read on!

CODING4FUN: INTRO TO XNA PART 3

Andy -TheZMan- has published the third part of his "Introduction to XNA" series, this time focusing on audio effects plus text rendering.

From the article: "... Before you go any further I need to explain how XNA works on the Xbox 360. Microsoft created a version of the .Net compact framework that runs on the Xbox 360, as well as Xbox versions of the XNA assemblies. To get these assemblies onto your Xbox 360 and enable deployment of XNA framework requires that you join the Creators Club which has a cost associated. The changes you will make for this article will work on the PC too, but you will not be able to play on the Xbox 360 without this. Microsoft have provided a video to help you get this installed: Getting Started with the XNA Creators Club ...".

This article is available on the Coding4Fun site.

ADVENTURES IN PERFORMANCE

NekoCake analyzes how to measure the performance of your game by using FPS ratio and frame time.

From the article: "... I’ll look at what FPS values actually mean, how we count them in game and then why it’s a bad idea to profile your games performance using FPS as your only metric ...".

It uses the new SpriteFont class to render the performance data on screen.