"XNATEXTURES.COM LAUNCHED!"

XNAResources has announced the launch of the second site in its network of sites: "XNATextures.com".

From the announcement: "... The site was formerly known as The TextureBin and already has over 1700 seamless high resolution textures!  XNATextures.com is membership based though... we offer 3 types of membership:

• Free 15 day Trial - Same as the standard below but limited to 15 days.
• Standard Membership - Access to all the content on the site in lower resolutions (500 pixels wide).
• Premium Membership - Access to all the content in the standard membership AND full access to high resolution versions of all the textures as well as bump maps, alpha maps, and games sized versions (powers of 2) of the textures in high resolution ...".

See ya!

"THRUST": THE SUCCESSOR OF XNA5D

Remember this post? Well, John Sedlak has announced the successor of his XNA5D engine ... and the name is "Thrust".

From John's post: "... Let me preface this story with a note that this is in no way an April Fools joke. The successor of Xna5D is Thrust and composes of all I have learned thus far. I am also pleased to announce that I have been working on several aspects of it with Matthew Randall. I thank him very much for contributing what he can to the project, even with his very busy schedule. I have decided that the development cycle of Thrust will be much slower compared to Xna5D ...".

So, let's thrust this is no April fools joke ... just kiddin' ... :)

HANDLING THUMBSTICKS' INPUT VALUES

Remember Shawn's Trilogy? As a bonus, he has posted a handy tip for hooking the values returned by thumbsticks to your game's physics calculations.

From Shawn's post: "... Good analog control has a huge impact on the feel of a game, and massaging your input values can do wonders to make things feel more controllable and responsive ...".

Read on!

THE END OF KRISC'S "XNA5D"?

Let's hope not.

From John's post: "... I have been getting e-mails and have had some comments about the next release of Xna5D. I am happy to say that it won't be coming, at least not in the way anyone would expect it. I have been taking some time to take a deeper look into the design of the core as well as the design of XNA. I am specifically taking a look at content management, abstraction of services and entities. I have been working closely with a developer on the prior, working on a set of prototype classes that will serve as a complete replacement for any component functionality present in the Game class. I want more layers of functionality while maintaining 100% compatibility so that no one has to rewrite code if they do not want to. The latter, has yet to come to realization, but I have been researching some scripting and dynamic assembly programming so that code can be compiled and ran on the fly as well as loading and running of a complete assembly during game time ...".

Before you panic, then John adds: "... In the next few days I will be bringing a few changes to the site that reflect the new library and will at some point make the announcement about all the goodies ...".

Watch this space!

MORE ON XNA RSS-FEEDS CENTERS

In line with my previous post: Garret Hoofman has published the link to subscribe to his XNA Tab on Netvibes.

From Garret's post: " ... For those that use Netvibes, I have shared my XNA tab full of RSS feeds. I slimmed it back down a little bit so there aren't any more of the dead blogs.

Click --> Here <-- to add the page to your netvibes ...".

Cheers!

"XNA PORTAL": YOUR RSS-FEEDS CENTER FOR XNA

Now this is an interesting site ... XNA Portal is hosting RSS Feeds related to XNA.

So, if you have a site with news, articles, tutorials, games or any other topic or content related to XNA -and also has a RSS-feed enabled- then head over XNA Portal main page and add your news feed by entering the url of your RSS feed.

Nice one, guys!

THE "... SUCK" TRILOGY

Shawn Hargreaves has published a series of three posts declaring war to keyboards, gamepads and those handy little friends: computer mice!

He mentions the awful truth of these peripherals as far as game programming is concerned.

From Shawn's posts: "... Gamepads, like keyboards, are not perfect. They are designed to be cheap, sturdy, and nice to hold: accuracy comes second ...".

You can find the installments here:

• "Keyboards Suck",
• "Gamepads Suck", and
• "Mice Suck".

The posts give useful advice on how to deal with keyboards and gamepads as well as explains how XNA makes our lives easier for reading thumbsticks' absolute positions.

Enjoy!

"INTERVIEW WITH MICROSOFT GAME STUDIO'S SHANE KIM" - PART 2

Do you remember this post? If you don't follow the link and read it but if you do just go ahead and read part 2 published by Gamasutra.

This second part of the interview to Shane Kim and Dave Mitchell covers "... their feelings toward Nintendo as competition, Microsoft's strategy of funding game development in Japan, the upcoming episodic Halo content, Peter Jackson, and more ...".

And yes, XNA GSE is mentioned throughout the interview. Take for instance: "... we've got over eighty universities from eight countries that are teaching, including Japan. In Japan, we've got Iwatani-san, the creator of Pac-Man, extremely excited about getting into the possibilities of Express. As a result, when he retires, he is going to be teaching at Tokyo Polytechnic University, using Game Studio Express to teach game design to future game developers ... ".

The creator of Pac-Man ... impressive, ugh?

Ok, please all repeat after me: "XNA rules!" ... ;)

TIPS: "SOFTWARE EFFICIENCY AND OPTIMIZATION - PART 2"

The awaited second part of the series is now available on "Advice From the Swamp" blog.

This time Thomas explains the initial How To's for benchmarking your algorithms and methods -and includes two source code samples.

From Thomas post: "... If benchmarking shows your algorithm has problems without implementation optimizations, you are probably better off with a different algorithm. Which isn't to say that these sorts of optimizations aren't still useful. But it's better to do these selectively, once you have your code implemented and have profiled it to find specific problem areas. We'll look at how to use a profiler to find these problem areas next week, in Part 3 ...".

Cannot wait for part 3 ... :)

VISUAL3D.NET PRODUCT DEMO VIDEO

Continuing the news of upcoming amazing frameworks for rapid game creation, a new video showing off the features of Visual3D.Net has been released:

Nice ... now, licenses and prices?

"XNA WEEKLY ROUNDUP 18-03-07 TO 26-03-07"

Mykres has published his "Weekly Roundup" which covers source codes, projects, games, new blogs/sites, tutorials and game releases from March 18, 2007 to March 26, 2007.

From Mykres' post: "... It has been a relatively quite week in the world of XNA; this must be due to the April Update coming soon. But through the week we have seen some discussions on Performance. I remember with Managed DirectX everyone seemed to be talking about the Perfect Game Loop, but with XNA it seems to be Performance and the Foreach functions, this month cornflower Blue gives us some thoughts on the Foreach loop.

We also got to see the release of some more applications including Sky burner and Realms of Keldar, both of these are games ported from another code base.

This week David Weller gives us an introduction into Source control with the express products, as well as giving some praise to Sharky on his Air Legends Game (Which now includes Multi Player Split Screen). But most of All David tells us that the XNA Teams are Hiring, note that you do not send your information to David please follow the correct path for any applications or Questions.

Also George from XNADevelopment has posted a brief game design spec for his Dream Build Play entry. ...".

Find the whole news update here ...

BLADE3D PRICES HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED!

Along with the latest build of this amazing framework (that is, build 1595), the guys behind its development have finally announced both licenses and prices.

From GameDev.net's announcing post: "... Pricing for Blade3D 1.x will be $99 for non-commercial use, and $249 for commercial use. The open and free Beta 1 of Blade3D can be downloaded from the product website at http://www.blade3d.com ..."

Let's the games begin ...

"SOME CODE IS MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"

No, it's not Confusio ... it's Shawn Hargreaves striking back on the topic of optimization.

In his latest post, Shawn talks about how to priorize and optimize things when dealing with different kind of programming, plus he opens the x-files of his life and reveals some dirty secrets of his past.

From Shawn's post: "... This is one of the reasons I like having a content pipeline that separates build time data processing from my runtime game code. The more computations I can move from my game into a custom content processor, the less product code I have to write. Processors are internal utilities that only ever have to run on my computer, so I can get away with all kinds of shortcuts that would never be acceptable if I was doing this processing as part of my shipping game code. ...".

I agree. What is more, for those of you who may think that the content processor could turn out to obstruct the creation of a game editor (say, for the PC platform) by using the XNA Framework, I'm afraid that you are forgeting something: "MS Build" console application and the "XNA Content Builder Application" comes to the rescue when you need to import content "on-the-fly" (unless of course you decide to make your own "dynamic" loader).

Cheers!

WHO'S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF XNA GAME STUDIO EXPRESS?

Good question.

Michael Klucher explains who are behind "XNA", or in better words, the teams in charge of the respective areas that make up "XNA" as a whole.

From Michael's post: "... To translate that a bit, XNA is a brand that encompasses all of the game development products, initiatives and services for developing games on Microsoft platforms. So you may be wondering "Who's responsible for the development of XNA Game Studio Express?" There are several teams that make up XNA ...".

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NEW XNA BLOG: "ADVICE FROM THE SWAMP"

There's a new blogger in the XNA Community: Thomas Aylesworth (you can also see screenshots and or download his game: "Space Invasion").

And he's opened with a great subject ...one of the topics that Shawn likes most :) ... Software Efficiency and Optimization (Part 1).

As you an see this is the first installment of a series so stay tuned to his blog.

Cheers!

DAVID WELLER SAYS "WE ARE HIRING!"

Dave's latest post informs that there are 5 opening jobs in the "XNA Developer Connection" organization, so if you're interested and think you qualify just follow the links included in his post to submit your resume.

Good luck!

[When will be the day when only C# is requested? ... C++ is still a must ... also, what about "tele-working"? ... ok, let's stop the daydream ... back to the ultracave!]

GAMEVIDEOS.COM'S GDC2007 COVERAGE ON XNA

News in line with my previous post: GameVideos.Com has published a series of 3 videos interviewing Shane Kim (Microsoft Game Studios Vice-President) and Dave Mitchell (Microsoft Game Developer Group Director of Marketing).

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

Enjoy!

"THE YOUTUBE OF GAMES: MICROSOFT GAME STUDIO'S SHANE KIM ON XNA STUDIO EXPRESS"

Gamasutra has published a 3-page article entitled "The YouTube of Games: Microsoft Game Studio's Shane Kim on XNA Studio Express", covering among other topics, the future of XNA GSE.

From the article: "... With the release of XNA Game Studio Express just behind them, Gamasutra met with Microsoft Game Studios' corporate vice president Shane Kim, and Microsoft Game Developer Group director of marketing Dave Mitchell in the heat of the 2007 Game Developers Conference.

In this extensive interview, we discussed the Xbox 360's current placement in the market, the possibility of making harddrives mandatory, the state of Microsoft Game Studios in Japan, future Zune connectivity with the 360, Kim's thoughts about the competition, and the future of XNA Game Studio Express, both commercially and for educational purposes. ...".

Interesting read.

"XNA WEEKLY ROUNDUP 12-03-07 TO 18-03-07"

Mykres has published his "Weekly Roundup" which covers source codes, projects, games, new blogs/sites, tutorials and game releases from March 12, 2007 to March 18, 2007.

From Mykres' post: "... Ok, that's it for this week; remember if you have anything that you would like added please post. Also one more thing if you have any questions on the XNA Framework, Game Studio Express or any other game development question you can drop over to http://creators.xna.com. Or you could jump onto the IRC and talk with us all live, we are currently living on Efnet under the Channel XNA, hope to see you there. ...".

Watch this space!

KYLE SCHOUVILLER ON 2D COLLISION DETECTION

Kyle has posted a nice read with tips useful to face the task of inplementing Collision Detection in Two Dimensions.

From Kyle's post: "... Use the Separating Axis Theorem. Use a space-division scheme, like a Quadtree. Use multiple levels of collision detection to avoid unnecessary testing. Use a common bounding structure for all objects so they can interact generically. Those are things I learned when I did it. ...".

Stay tuned!