"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!