WATCHING THE SUN BURN – PART 1

I’ve just got the opportunity to download and test one of the greatest add-on solutions for XNA GS-based projects that one may find these days:

Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine.

This product, from Synapse Gaming, saves lots of time for us, XNA Game Creators, when we have to cope with both, the design and implementation of a 3D rendering pipeline for our PC and XBOX 360 games; in particular:

• Dynamic lights and shadows,
• Forward and deferred rendering, and
• Post-processing.

As a matter of fact, Sunburn integrates flawlessly with XNA GS by extending its Application Model, where needed.

But, how come? … ok, before moving onto some tech words (in part 2), just watch the following two videos that really blew my head off:

1. PowerStation Demo (deferred rendering):

Nice, hu?! The source code that produces those great realtime renders serves as a kick off for a pro-like FPS project with little to almost none modifications (btw, the demo project is available in the company’s download page).

Now let’s watch the second video …

2. Reflection-Refraction Demo (forward rendering):

As you can guess and see, this example demands more GPU power. Yeap, the calculations are more intensive here as you approach to three floating orbs, but it does well.

Despite the fact that the app used to record this videos on my desktop PC pushed down the FPS count more than in a normal situation, you can see that the action flows smoothly.

An we’re talking here of a ‘Release’ full-screen compilation targeting the PC and using a high-definition back-buffer of 1280x720.

On my Core 2 Duo desktop PC with a GeForce 8600 gfx -as you can see a standard desktop nowadays- results were indeed promising. For the first demo, the average frames per second count was above 30, and for the second one, above 25.

Accompanied by a set of sample projects, articles and full VS integration, this add-on, in the “flavor” that meets your business’ needs, is a “must have”.

Now, what editions can we find? And, which are the differences among them? This comparison chart answers both questions plus indicates the usual price for each:

“Wait! Why did you say ‘usual’ price?” Glad you ask and here’s the best part … since Synapse Gaming is now a Creators’ partner, all premium members can get the following discounts:

• SunBurn Community: $100 discount, or
• SunBurn Pro: $50 discount.

Nice …

Ok, this is it for today. On part two, will be getting a bit into the code side of one of these samples.

‘till then,
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

NOT THAT EMPTY ...

There's a great series of articles regarding game development with XNA being posted at this blog: "Running on Empty".

So far, 16 out of 25 articles have been posted covering a lot of aspects of game development both, in theory and in practice, not only to get started but also to help you implement advanced features such as "physics".

But the best is yet to come since the remaining articles will cover more advanced topics like "parallel split shadow mapping", deferred shading and "split space ambiet occlusion".

Happy reading!

XNA GS 3: THE LUCKY NUMBER!

Being an old timer, it's incredible to see how fascinating the world of XNA is moving ahead. Since Managed DX first appeared, there also appeared the first steps of a big company to introduce C#, and managed code in general, into the game-development industry.

After all the uncertainty around the future of managed code in games when the doom of MDX 2 was unveiled -specially for all us who had embraced c# and MDX for our game projects, a new word started to being rumored with higher and higher strength: XNA.

Since the first beta of XNA GS was released, this baby has been growing up at a steady and solid pace. In fact, with this recent great announcement, MS has confirmed that is betting a hugh stake on the project and if you ask me, it's a winner bet. Other big companies are trying to copycat the idea, but they aren't moving that fast and that well, plus they're still attached to C++ ... and I love C#!

Being an indie, knowing that in a few months I'll have the possibility to sell my games for the XBox 360 as well as produce games for Zune is really exciting. It's very difficult and expensive to make a game project to reach the "going gold" phase, and MS way may prove to be an affordable means to show off our creations, get a contract with a publisher and why not, directly sell our games with an interesting profit, why not?

I don't know about you, but I was waiting to hear (or read) something like this all these years. Thumbs up for the XNA Team! Way to go ...

Cheers!

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!

XNA GAME STUDIO 2.0 (BETA) IS NOW AVAILABLE

As announced by the XNA Team, the beta version of the awaited XNA GS 2.0 has been released!!!

So go and visit the following:

1. The official announcement :)
2. The "What's new" page, and
3. The beta home page.

Don't forget to check the new "Project Upgrade Wizard", the newly updated demo sample projects, and the "Net Rumble Starter Kit".

Enjoy!

NVIDIA PERFHUD 5.1

It's been a long time since my last post but I think this news deserves it ... the new version of nVidia's PerfHUD tool supports XNA builds.

Don't believe me? Just read this: "... PerfHUD 5.1 Highlights:

• GeForce 8 Series support on Windows Vista and XP (older GPUs are also supported)
• Microsoft Windows Vista support (DirectX 9 and 10)
• New in 5.1! Instrumented driver updated to 163.71
• New in 5.1! Compatibility with Managed and XNA applications ...".

To download this great real-time perfomance analysis tool, just navigate to this page.

THE TOP 10 MYTHS OF VIDEO GAME OPTIMIZATION

Hi folks, just a quick note: there's a great article on Gamasutra: "The Top 10 Myths of Video Game Optimization", by Eric Preisz.

Read on!

SECOND DAY WEBCAST?

I don't know about you guys but the sessions of the first day were really great! So many info shared, previews, experiences, images, demos, videos, and so on. And the webcast itself was loud and clear ... I eperienced only one glitch and it was on my side (too many webpages opened).

I know it was announced that only the first day would be webcasted but, given the importance of the sessions and the fact that many of us couldn't attend the gamefest this year, let's hope the XNA Team decides -of course, if within possibilities- to webcast today's XNA sessions.

Fingers crossed!

NETWORKING COMMING UP NEXT!

The one we all were probably waiting for ... and is comming along nicely!

Some features we will find:

• Reliable UDP, ordering, etc.
  Packages can be sent to a specific player and to all players on the session.
  360 players can join Windows sessions and viceversa.
  Player-to-player voice.
  "Lobby" management so as to sync games (isReady and isEveryoneReady properties).
  and much more.

Some we don't by now: Game invites, Leaderboards, etc.

Some we probably won't (or at least in the middle run):

• Ranked matchmaking.
• Achievements.
• Raw sockets.

A couple of great questions:

• ¿Dead Reckoning? Nope. This version will provide basic functionality, so you should build upon it by yourself.
• ¿Beta Public Release? Maybe in a couple of months (more good news!).
• Didn't get the answer about the kind of suscription to play networked games (silver or gold), maybe gold? Sorry about htis one.

Btw, if after building the game you try to host/join a session but get an unhandled exception, just recompile your code and try again ... :)

GAINING SOME PERFORMANCE ON XNA GSE

Man! I really need to get Shawn' slides ... very useful info and tips to program game using XNA GSE, both for Windows and the 360. He covered many areas, like graphics, math, threading and profilin tools.

Hereunder you will find some bullets:

• Graphics: Shawn mentioned things like the spritebatch, then shaders, materials and effects, and finally renderstates. Some conclusions: use the GPU the most you can, don't forget to set SpriteSetMode, undesrtand the 360 system's calls and avoid the use of states blocks.
• Math: is incredible how one can gain some performance by passing structs by reference and inline some computation. About the latter, constructs can be manually inlined (an example was provided). Those of us who have experienced .NET Framework 3 and 3.5 do know that the way this is handled in those versions of the .NET framework is quite handy.
• Threading: a must! To take advantage of this feature on the 360 one have to understand how the cores and threads per core are organized as well as the fact that one must manually assign threads to the 360's cores (this is not done automatically for you). Also take due note that the Content Manager is not thread-safe and input handling is not threadable on windows (meaning, it has to run on the main thread, always).
• Profiling Tools: there is not much help on the 360 to identify bottlenecks, thus, profile on windows and do some inference (of course, remember the way the compact framework deals with the GC and generations).

There were more points to mention about Shawn's presentation plus plenty of smart questions, but you'll have to watch the webcast later to get all of them ... ;)

Phew! ... a 30 minutes brake. Thanks so much! I need some rest ...

XNA GAME STUDIO 2.0

The second presentation has finished and many interesting things came out. You can find some of the upcomingfeatures on the XNA Team Blog. Again, what happened to the "Express" word? Simpe. Everything lays now on a common ground!

The news ... there's new content available on the creators site:

• a premium starter kit: Ship Game.
• a couple of samples: Distortion and Shader Series 4: Materials and Multiple Light Sources, and,
• a new tutorial: Optimization: Particles and High-Frequency Code.

You can check it out all here.

Also, you can watch a video of the first Xbox Live Arcade created all the way with XNA GSE: Schizoid (presented on the first webcast by the producers/developers of the game -Torpex Games- and is the focus of the third webcast, which is going to start in a couple of minutes).

Well, in fact I see the guys preparing the third webcast -images and sound is being transmitted- so, again, gotta go ... stay tuned!

FX COMPOSER 2 OFFICIALLY RELEASED!!!

Hi, folks! Just a quick note: FX Composer 2 has been officially released today. Finally!!!

For those who may not know what FXC2 is -if there's someone out there who doesn't know about this great tool yet- browse to this website and read on and or watch this video:

BTW, guess which language was used to build this version of the tool ... yes, you can say it, don't be shy ... c# ... isn't it great?!

See ya.

"STENCIL SWIPES"

Shawn Hargreaves has published the third part of the series that cover "transitions", this time centering attention on the use of stencil buffers to produce some nice effects.

From the post: "... Stencil is usually an 8 bit integer value, and is attached to each pixel in addition to the usual color and depth values. You can set renderstates to control how values are written into the stencil buffer while drawing graphics, and also to specify that graphics should only be drawn in areas where the existing stencil values meet specified conditions ...".

Consice, accurate and practical. The best part on the series so far, imho of course ... cheers!

"XMESSAGE" XNA COMPONENT

Created by X has published a new component for XNA , "xMessage", designed for displaying in-game chararacter dialogs.

From the post: "... the component allows an image to be displayed with the text, and the text is also dynamically changes acording to the size of the dialog. When running the demo use the left mouse button to move the dialog and the right mouse button to resize the dialog ...".

See ya!

DEALING WITH MATRICES IN XNA

Rhysyngsun has submitted to Ziggyware the article: "Introduction to Matrices in XNA".

From the article: "... Understanding matrices is a fundamental part of creating effective games in XNA. Matrices particularly flex their muscle when you're working in full 3D space, however, the math behind them can be daunting. Fortunately, XNA provides most of the functionality for matrices that you will ever need without having to worry about the complicated math behind that functionality. However, it is necessary to have an understanding of what this functionality is actually doing in order to apply it correctly in your code ...".

Watch this space!

QUATERNION CAMERA IN XNA

Scot Boyd, author of the upcoming book "Expert One on One: XNA Game Programming for Xbox 360 and Windows", has provided the source code of the "QuaternionCamera" class which will help you avoid that nasty Gimbal Lock problem that you may face when working with yaw, pitch and roll at a time.

From the post: "... XNA unfortunately does not provide a QuaternionCamera class in it's Framework. Nowhere on the Internet could I find a camera class that provides six degrees of freedom without requiring additional coding from the reader ... In the process of attacking this problem in my book, I've made a few camera classes. I'm posting the simplest class here - good for beginners. The final camera class in the book will be more complicated. This class should provide a good jumping-off point for anybody interested, or a simple helper class for those who just want a camera without hassles. In the camera, GetViewMatrix and CreateYawPitchRoll are where the money is ...".

Read on!

"KRYSALIS" SHOOTER PROJECT

There's a new blogger in the XNA community, which will post details, information and screenshots of the shooter projectKrysalis.

Here you will find some description of the game and here the software being used for its development.

Also, there's a couple of screenshots of the custom tools created for building up the game.

Nice!

TABBING BETWEEN CONTROLS ...

... is what you'll see in the video available below, which shows off some GUI features of the upcoming Thrust engine.

From the post: "... Below is a short video clip of me testing out GUI Pathing in Thrust ... I can't wait to see what people come up when using this. In the demo, I am simply tabbing between the controls. It will work much the same with the XBOX 360 GamePad, allowing a user to "tab" to the next menu option, et cetera ...".

Bye.

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.