From the article: "... With some of the projects that I am working I am going to have to be able to store player and game data, so with this in mind I thought that it was time I had a look at the storage systems that are included in the XNA Framework. The first stage in this project was to make sure that I had had a good read of the Documentation files for the Storage System that Shipped with the XNA Framework ...".
Read on!
Showing posts with label XNA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label XNA. Show all posts
Monday, May 07, 2007
NEW ARTICLE: "XNA STORAGE"
Head over "Mykres Space" to read the following handy article: "XNA Storage - The Beginning".
JOHN SEDLAK'S "TOWER DEFENSE" BETA
John sedlak has published a beta of the first game that "The Gib Factory" has ever created: "Tower Defense".
From John's post: "... It is 05/06/07, and today is the day we, "The Gib Factory", are releasing a Beta to our first game, Tower Defense. A lot of progress was made over the past week and even in the last couple of hours. Sounds have made their way into the game as well as particle effects for towers and the GUI is becoming more and more complete everyday. We are looking forward to hearing back from everyone about this version, what works and what doesn't as well as any bugs you may find ...".
Downloading it right now ...VERTEX BUFFER, TANGENTS, BINORMALS AND SO ON
Ziggy has published a couple of handy source codes:
- "Converting Vertex Buffer Formats in XNA", and
- "Calculating Tangents and Binormals/Bitangents in XNA".
Watch this space!
NEW ARTICLE: "QUADTREE"
Kyle Shouviller has written a nice article on quadtrees with also comes with source code included.
From Kyle's article: "... Imagine a game like Pong, except with a rotating triangular ball. This ball needs to have perfect collision detection with the paddles, which means if any part of the triangle intersects with the paddle, there is a collision. You can’t just do simple radial collision detection, nor can you do rectangle collision detection, because the triangle might not actually be colliding for some collisions detected in those cases. However, performing the triangle-to-paddle collision detection can be expensive to do every frame (I know, not that expensive – but imagine 200 balls with 30 players around a big field with balls also colliding with each other, or something like that). So what are you to do? ...".
Read on!"PROFESSIONAL XNA GAME PROGRAMMING" BOOK: UPDATED SOURCE CODE
Ziggy has posted a message from Chris Webb -Executive Editor at Wrox- who announces that the source code of the book "Professional XNA Game Programming" has been recently updated.
From the message: "... Yesterday I received updated code from Ben for Professional XNA Game Programming, and it is now live on the book’s page at wrox.com. This new code replaces all of the code previously available on the book’s download site, so all readers should update as soon as possible.
The update includes bug fixes, all samples now compile on both XNA Versions and on Windows (XP and Vista) and Xbox 360. In addition, Ben also included new support for some older ATI video cards because he’s cool like that ...".
What are you waiting for? Just go and download the updated files!Friday, May 04, 2007
"XNAPROJECTS.NET" IS LIVE
Benny has announced that his new site "XnaProjects.Net" is up and running. But, what is it? A new XNA Community site where you can submit your games and links.
From the announcement: "... Yesterday I wanted to put all the samples from the book on my blog, but it is already way to overloaded here with screenshots and games, adding another 10 games will not make anything better. Instead I had a crazy idea to create a XNA Community site in one day. It is called XnaProjects.Net. The idea is for everyone to submit their games and links. News are grabbed with Google Blog Search and more features will come in July 2007 when I got more than 5 minutes time in a row ...".
Cool!"TRANSITIONS PART ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF CURVES"
As promised, Shawn is starting to blog on transitions with "... The Importance of Curves".
From the post: "... Whenever you are dealing with transitions that take some fixed amount of time to complete, it can be useful to normalize their position along this timeline into a control value in the range 0 to 1. This makes the transition state easier to manipulate ... More importantly, you can apply curves to make the animation speed up or slow down in interesting ways. Normalized control values are useful for this because it is easy to apply curves that will affect their shape without changing the overall range of the motion ...".
Read on!Thursday, May 03, 2007
EXTENDING THE CONTENTMANAGER FOR MODELS
There's a new article on Cornflower Blue's blog that demonstrates how to extend the content manager so as to handle the setup of models being imported.
From Eli's post: "... I don't know about everyone else, but usually the first thing I do after loading models is loop over their effects and set up their lighting. (Check Shawn's blog to read more about the standard lighting rig and per pixel lighting. ) The other day I thought of a neat way to tuck this code away a little, so I thought I'd share.
A subclass of ContentManager could easily handle the model setup code for us automatically. It could check what kind of content it's being asked to load, and if the content type is a Model, it can set up the model automatically ...".
Read on!SHOCKWAVE DISTORTION EFFECT
Jamezilla has submitted a new tutorial to Ziggyware which shows how to implement a shockwave distortion effect in HLSL.
From the tutorial: "... The render routine will draw the scene to a RenderTarget2D, then draw the render target to backbuffer normally, then draw the render target to backbuffer again with the shockwave shader ...".
MOVING SPRITES OVER BEZIER CURVES
Cube2D has submitted a new tutorial to Ziggyware which shows how to move sprites over bezier curves.
From the tutorial: "... Just about every beginners tutorial for XNA starts off with the same things, making a sprite move along the screen. I'm going to show you how to do the same thing, but over a curved line, more specifically over a Bezier Curve. Curvy behaviour its a pretty neat thing to do for some games. You could set up a Physics engine to solve all movement in you game (a relatively complex thing to do) but for some games this would be unnecessary. For example, if your making a side scrolling shooter with aeroplanes you could very easily make your missiles drop from your aircraft, curve backwards a bit and then speed forward ...".
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".
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) ...".
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 ...".
Monday, April 30, 2007
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.
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