THRUST INPUT SYSTEM

John comments on the new input core of his engine: "Thrust".

From the post: "... Thrust, unlike Xna5D, has recieved its own project folder for 360 compatible work and I am happy to report that the new input core is running on both Windows and the 360. So how does this new Input services work? I have decided to go much the same route as the new GUIManager by templating the main class, Ebi. When you create a new Ebi (Event Based Input) object, you pass along the type of an object that inherits from ControllerBase. This allows the Ebi object to instance your controller's code and use it ...".

Nice!

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!

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!

"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!

"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!

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 ...".

Let's read!

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 ...".

Read on!

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.

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!

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!

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!

"XNARACINGGAME.COM" IS NOW ONLINE

As announced by Benjamin Nitchke, the new site for the just-released "Racing Game" starter kit is now up and running.

From the announcement: "... The download file is 130 MB in size and will eat up almost 290 MB of your hard disk space extracted. It is also only available in the .vsi format and can't be used in anything but XNA Game Studio Express or Visual C# Express. The main reason for this incredible size is the Textures directory, with uses mainly uncompressed .TGA files ...".

Let's race!

XNAGPUPARTICLES V1.1

There's a new version of the XNAGPUParticles application at Artificial-Studios.co.uk, with adjustments to the way the vertex texture system works among other things.

From Mike's post: "... it takes a texture and picks out pixel colours from the texture and maps it onto a large vertex buffer which then is used as the input to my Vetex Texture particle system ...".

Nice!

TIP: AUTOFORMATTING MULTIPLE LINES OF TEXT

Rhysingsun has posted a code snippet for autoformatting multiple lines of text when using the new XNA's fonts system.

From the post: "... I've been putting off my GUI because I didn't want to redesign once the XNA team's font support came out, here's the first trick I created, to help myself with my GUI: autoformatting multiple lines of text. If you look into the documentation it says that the new text functionality will go the a new line with the text if the '\n' character is found. However, this makes for some static game design. What if I want the text block to be wider? ...".

Watch this space!

NEW CONTENT FOR "XNA'ERS"

Ok, so you downloaded the refresh update for XNA GSE v1.0, read the readme page and updated the framework on your system, but have you happened to check the new content available at http://creators.xna.com?

I knew it! Don't be a lazybones, pay a visit to the XNA Creators Club Online site and:

• Download the new starter kit: finally! The long-awaited "Racing Game" (formerly called "XNA Racer"),
• Download the new samples: 3D audio, bloom, 2D particles, and many more.
• Read the new articles: data structure and the shader series,
• Watch the new video tutorials: advance audio series, and,
• Download the new utilities: the "Bitmap Font Maker" utility and controller graphics.

Wow!

[Are you an "XNA'ER"? Sounds cool, doesn't it?]

A SIMPLE POST-PROCESSING BLOOM/BLUR EFFECT

Jamezila from skasoftware.com has submitted a handy tutorial on post processing bloom/blur effects to Ziggyware, which includes source code and a zip file to downlaod.

Read on!

TUTORIAL: INTRODUCTION TO XNA

There's a new tutorial available on c-sharpcorner.com site entitled: "Introduction to XNA: The Microsoft 2D and 3D Game Development Platform" -by Mike Gold.

From Mike's post: "... Although I couldn't name all the episodes, I think I watched every original Star Trek episode that was produced. My fascination with Star Trek didn't end with the original, but continued into the Next Generation. After that, I kinda lost track...Anyway, this month, Microsoft came out with an article in MSDN on the XNA framework, written by Charles Cox and Michael Klucher. I became intrigued and decided to pursue exploring the XNA Framework. In doing so, I created this simple example. Most of the inspiration for this article didn't come from the MSDN article, but from a game called elves revenge on a website called Errolian. By examining this code, I was able to piece together this demonstration of XNA ...".

Read on.

SETTING UP "GUIMANAGER"

Check out Aaron's blog for his first tutorial, which covers setting up his GUIManager class.

From Aaron's post: "... The simplest way to begin is to use the GUI_Testbed project as a starting template. I simply created a new source file containing a class called Tutorial1, and set that as the startup Game object in Program.cs. You could also just use the existing GUI_Testbed.cs if you don't feel like starting from scratch ...".

More news after the break ...