NEW ARTICLE: "XNA STORAGE"

Head over "Mykres Space" to read the following handy article: "XNA Storage - The Beginning".

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!

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:

1. "Converting Vertex Buffer Formats in XNA", and
2. "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!

NEW FF2 TRAILER

Almost every comic fan in the world is paying attention to the spiderman 3 movie -now in theaters- because of the appearance of one of the fiercest foes ever: Venom.

However, and despite the fact that I haven't gone the cinema yet to watch the above-mentioned movie, I'm particularly more excited with the Fantastic Four's sequel. Why? First, if the Silver Surfer is in it, it should also imply that "Gah Lak Tus" is. And second, because of this new trailer.

I'm not going to argue why I prefer more FF over SP series of movies, at least for now, but in short, I'm not happy with the way Peter Parker's life is being presented/plotted. Maybe in a later post I could explain the reasons behind my sentiment, but for now, I'd only say the the part of the script that deals with PP should be improved.

Anyway, the new FF trailer rocks!

[Btw, an ironman movie is coming ...]

"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!