LOTS OF NICE PRESENTS THIS WEEK

Yestreday, David Weller announced two interesting things that Santa will deliver soon:

First, more details will be given about the upcoming warm-up challenge.

Second, and maybe the most interesting part of the announcememt -at least for me- and I quote: "... We will have lots of nice presents this week for all you good XNA developers ...".

So, have you been a good XNA developer this year?

MAPZONE EDITOR V2.6

With version 2.6 of ProFX comes along the respective version of MaPZone editor. For those of you who never heard about these two:

• MaPZone is an quite handy editor that builds procedural textures, and
• ProFX is a middleware solution that helps handling those procedural textures.

V2.6 of the editor isn't yet available for download but you can get it via 3DWorld magazine.

Now, what about ProFX? If you're using XNA you may have read this announcement: "ProFX to be part of Microsoft's XNA Tool Suite (2007, March 26)" and perhaps got excited. If so, hold your horses. No news, ETA, beta or even alpha whatsoever, just this thread.

Procedural texturing brings a lot of advantages over traditional texturing techniques. To mention a few:

• you save deployment space, and depending on how and when you generate the final textures, disk space,
• like in procedural shaders, the textures are generated at any given resolution, and
• 4D textures (real-time recomputing of textures).

Thus, let's hope the guys from Allegorithmic and the XNA Team meet this week in Seattle to make the above-mentioned announcement become a soon reality.

Fingers crossed!

PHYSX FOR (XNA) PHYSICS

Checking connect entries for XNA I found this one: Physics API.

Following one of the links provided by Mike555, I found a page where the guys behind MS Robotic Studio claim to have a managed wrapper for Ageia's PhysX.

I don't know whether this wrapper is a lite version or not (and by "lite" I mean if it doesn't implement all the functionality available in the original API), but it would be quite handy if the XNA Team could talk to these guys in order to integrate that managed API into XNA.

Possibilities could be endless for our games if that happens.

Let's hope someday we'll see an AAA physics API like Ageia's being integrated into XNA.

BTW, and switching topics to the warm-up challenge, let's thank Mykres for listing links to interesting sites that cover AI for games. Check the list out and do some reading.

Cheers!