Tuesday, May 01, 2007

BENNY'S BOOK IS ON FIRE!

Yeap, indeed.

Read the post on Machaira's Space blog: "... Looks like Ben Nitschke's XNA book, Professional XNA Game Programming For Xbox 360 and Windows, is doing pretty well. I got a call from Chris Webb at Wrox (since I was the tech editor on the book) letting me know that it's in the top 600 of all books on Amazon.com (it's at 520 at the time I'm writing this) and in the top 20 of Computer books (16 at this time). Looking at the computer related books ahead of it and considering where it's at having only been available for a couple of weeks, I have a feeling it's going to move quickly up that chart ...".

Congrats, man!

VISUAL3D.NET BETA1 IS OUT

RightRiot has announced on Realmware's forums that the first open beta for Visual3D.Net framework has been released.

Finally!

MCCODER'S "LITTLE COLLISION MANAGER"

MCCoder has published the source code for his "Stand alone little collision manager".

From the post: "... I had previously been doing all my collision stuff during my physics steps, which led to pretty fantasic failure cases. I was checking to make sure the objects were heading in the same direction before I’d say there was a collision, but this often led to objects coming to a rest while penetrating another object (say two objects interpenetrated and bounced off each other, but not with enough force to actually seperate them) ...".

Read on.

RICK HOSKINSON'S LAMPGAME UPDATE

Rick has posted an update of his "LampGame".

From the post: "... Despite my lack of posting, work on my ambient game continues. I'm working 60 to 90 hour weeks these days so I don't have a lot of free time for things like blogging, games, or sleep ...".

Bye.

TECH SAMMURAI'S POST-PROCESSING SYSTEM PREVIEW

Tech Sammurai has published a preview of the source code of his post-procesing system.

From the post: "... Anyway, since I’m starting the development process over, I can’t just upload the entire engine for you all to try. Again, I’m really sorry. However, the PostProcessor will stay pretty much the same in terms of how it is called, so I decided to show you just how easy it will be to add Post Processing to your game ...".

Watch this space!

BORTREIST'S GUI

Bortreist has started blogging on the progress on his GUI system, called "SimpleGUI".

From the posts: "... Below is a shot of a SimpleGUI Window hosting a SimpleGrid control and four ButtonLegendLabels (I need to come up with a new name for that one) ...".

Welcome!

JONAS FOLLES' FIRST XNA GAME: "XPONG"

Jonas Folles is sharing his first game created with the XNA Framework to the community.

From Jonas' post: "... So as I mentioned in the beginning I just completed my implementation of PONG written using the XNA framework. I wanted my PONG game to be more "complete" than some of the XNA PONG samples available online. There are some nice tutorials you might check out. One of them is a video tutorial over at LearnXNA that walks you through an implementation of Pong. Two other implementations worth checking out are Rob Loachs' XNA Pong and Tiny Tennis up on Coding4Fun ...".

Welcome, Jonas!

"SINGLETONS"

There's a new post at XNAtutorial which brings some light on the Farseer singleton.

From the post: "... In other words: When starting the game, the static Farseer is not created. If a piece of code tries to access the Physics property, then the static part of Farseer is created. Or, if someone tries to instantiate Farseer, it is not instantiated, but the static part is activated ...".

More after the break!

FRUSTRUM CULLING IN XNA

Inverse has posted an article at Ziggyware showing how to cull objects relative to a camera's frustrum.

From the article: "... To cull an object, you have to compute the object's bounding volume. Since we are keeping this article simple we will use bounding spheres. Bounding spheres are both economical and very fast.

Iterating thru the meshes in a model, we can merge the bounding spheres to produce a composite that bounds the entire model ...".

Read on!