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!

GAME DESIGN PROBLEM

After conquering "deferred shading", Jason Maskell is crying loud for help ... Ok, maybe I'm exagerating ... :)

As Jason approaches the phase of implementing a physics handler, he encounters a design crossroad. So he would like to hear what others with experience in the field have to add so as to help him decide what to do.

From the post: "... I’ve got to come up with some elegant system to retain my 2d movement vector on the flat grid, but also have an equivalent 3d worldspace vector at the same time. It’s an interesting problem but I think I’ve got it. It’s starting to feel grossly complicated though ...".

Have ideas? Post them here.

LINEAR COLLISIONS WITH XNA - PART II

McCoder has released the source code of the linear collision tests referred on my previous post.

From the post: "... There’s a ton of hack lying around in the code for my collision test app, but I figured my collision response code was probably clean enough to be useful to someone so I figured I’d post it up for everyone to check it ...".

Happy coding!

LINEAR COLLISIONS WITH XNA

McCoder shows a video with the latest results obtained on a XNA-based linear-collisions system:

From the post: "... I worked out some better collision response code and finally got some accurate and stable results. My primary goal was to get momentum transfer working correctly based on the object’s mass ...".

Later.

CONQUERING DEFERRED SHADING

Jason Maskell comments about his experiences with deferred shading techniques.

From Jason's post: "... I’ve thought that I’ll probably have to write a material editor sort of thing where my artist can play around with the materials settings until he finds out the right settings to stick in the lookup texture. For instance, he will be putting an index value in the alpha of the texture, which will then lookup into another texture to get 4 values instead of one ...".

Do I see some soft lighting in that screenshot?

VIDEO: FLOCKING ON XNA

Here's an interesting video showing off some flocking behavior of a group of boids, all done with XNA!

You can get to the author's site by following this link.

GETTING STARTED WITH XNA: PRIMITIVES

Brecht Kets has published a series of articles about primitives with XNA.

From the articles: "... A triangle is defined by 3 points, which is defined by a Vector3, containing the X, Y and Z coordinate (3D space), and maybe some additional information, such as color. Such a point is called a vertex. XNA has some vertex structures embedded, and one of them is perfect for this example: VertexPositionColor. So let us add this to our class ...".

You can find part I and part II on his blog.

"VISUAL3D.NET - XNA FOR THE MASSES, PART I"

Dan Maltes comments on Realmware's Visual3D.Net framework.

From the post: "... is a combination Game/Simulation engine and Game/Simulation building tool-set all built into one. This means it has much of what you need built right into it, saving you a tremendous amount of time and letting you, and your team, focus on the imaginative and creative part of your application. For instance, assigning keys and mouse clicks to control objects in your 3D world; normally you would have to write a whole bunch of code and event handling on your own to accomplish this. Visual3D has that built-in, so all you have to do is decide what keystroke or mouse-click does what. That is just the tip of the iceberg of what Visual3D has built into it ...".

Stay tuned.

MORE ON QUADTREES

Kyle strikes again on quadtrees, this time focusing on code design.

From kyle's article: "... Before I explain the classes, a picture of how the node tree is constructed in a Quadtree as objects are added and move through the tree (individual frames on click-through) ...".

Read on!

PREVIEWING "AIR LEGENDS" NEXT RELEASE

Sharky comments on the new features that we'll be getting with the next release of his game "Air Legends".

From Lawrence's post: "... I’ve added a much requested Special Manoevre (aka. evade) feature! I’m stoked about this. It really makes the gameplay a lot more dynamic. Essentially, using the Special Manoever button you can trigger the plane to pull the manoevre. Currently there are two manoevres ...".

Cannot wait!

NEED SHADERS?

In modern game development you'll most likely need to take advantage of your gfx card by using shader effects and in turn moving away from fixed-function pipeline techniques.

Thus, the need for hiring shader artists and or become one yourself -so as to create custom-made effects for your particular game or engine- just grows.

So, what to do? You can either do a google search -say, looking for free fx resources- buy some books that come packed with shader content -like the "ShaderX" series, hire a shader artist, and or build your own shaders by yourself from scratch or by modifying a pre-existing template (like the ones that come packed with the nVidia SDK 9.x/10).

Well, there's a new additional solution: "Shaders for Games" ... a site that should have been called "Shaders For Sale", instead ... check it out since these guys offer interesting HLSL shader packs at affordable prices.

The SM3 water fx screenshot looks great ...

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!