A NINTENDO PLANT ON BRASIL?

This is interesting news: the governor of Santa Catarina (Brasil) announced "... the installation of a plant of the Nintendo, that will produce games electronic aiming at to an ambitious program of exportation ...".

Here is the original news post and here is the translated one.

I hope someday we read something similar for the XBOX productline regarding SouthAmerica.

"DAVE WELLER FROM MICROSOFT"

Want to listen to what Dave has to say? Then listen to this podcast.

From the podcast: "... um ..."

Cheers!

RESOURCEMANAGER COMPONENT

Wizzie has released a component for handling resources, and thus the name: "ResourceManagement Component".

From the post: "... This is a very useful component since it allows for managing all of your resources in one object that is available anywhere in your engine via XNA Game Services. The code was written with the 360 in mind so there are work arounds in place for the .NET Compact Framework ...".

Nice!

BLADE3D BUILD 1817 IS OUT

Yes, the latest release of Blade3D beta1 (build 1817) is now available for donwload.

Hereunder is the list of changes:

• New SimpleTerrain Height and Raycast Operators,
• New audio system, with import, and preview,
• New TriggerVolume, GraphTrigger, SoundTrigger and AnimationTrigger,
• Opacity property now working on many MaterialsPlay Sound Operator,
• Ability to modify bitmap fonts from gallery,
• New Bounding Box ActionsBuilt-in support for Idle Animations,
• Random sound containers,
• New water normal texture,
• RenderColorTarget Semantic Now Evaluated Per-Pass,
• New Scene Level Bools For Enable/Disable Display Bounds, and
• Fixed some floor plane draw issues.

Happy coding!

USERCONTROL FOR RUNNING YOUR XNA GAME WITHIN A WINDOWS FORM

... or as Nuclex has posted: "XNA Windows.Forms UserControl".

The preview: "... as can be seen in one of my recent news posts, I did just that while developing a world editor for my upcoming game Island War. Because of the great demand for such a component, I decided to release my XNA GameControl class to the public ...".

The screenshot:

And the link to it.

Handy, very handy ...

CRIMSON UPDATE ... AGAIN

Diagrams showing the layout of the engine are now available:

Plus a new video:

Also, as usual, a preview of the post: "... Animated sprites have been a fun feature to add, my implementation hangs around the concept of an animation sheet. my orc test sprite has some animations in separate.png files and some bunched together on the same .png. So how do i handle them? every animation gets a animation sheet, which contains its start frame, end frame and a reference to its texture. these are held in a dictionary as a value, the key to that dictionary is a CompassDirection (north, NorthEast ect). I have a load of these in a list, and i keep there indexes in another dictionary with a AnimationState(move, idle, jump etc). To get the correct animation sheet you just need to know what direction and animation you currently in and pull em out ...".

Ultrahead's out.

TRANSITIONS - PART 2

Shawn has published the second installment on his series of articles regarding "trabsitions", this time focusing on the physics part.

From the post: "... you may not know exactly when you want things to start or stop moving. When the factors controlling your transitions get more complicated, it can be easier to switch to a physics based approach ...".

Read on!

STREAM CONTENT PROCESSOR

Created by X has published a content processor for XNA that allows you to read content files as streams.

From the post: "... The StreamContentProcessor allows you to use simple stream based importer and/or processors, so you can read your content files as a stream using content.Load("AssetName") ...".

Downloading it now ...

"GETTING STARTED WITH XNA" - THE SERIES

Remember this post? Brecht is back with more tutos:

• Getting started with XNA - Primitives: the basics part 2,
• Getting started with XNA - Primitives: Introducing the Index Buffer, and
• Getting started with XNA - Drawing 2D Textures.

Read on!

SOME PROBLEMS WITH MY DESKTOP

Yes, my desktop went no-no last weekend, ... again. Since I have no yet found a restoring system that works well on a WinXP Pro x64 OS -I mean a complete one, not the application that comes packed with the OS, I'm manually reinstalling almost everything, or at least the things that I need most.

Well, other than that, sorry for being late with the news post.

One good note: along with other books, I've receive Benny's. So I will start reading it as soon as I can and maybe post a full review (why not?).

Cheers!