HOW TO COMPRESS AUDIO USING XACT

One of the questions we developers usually ask is "what can I do to reduce the size of my executable and content files?". The answer for audio content has been provided by Mitch, who has published the process you must follow so as to compress audio using the XACT tool.

From the post: "... there is some support for compressing your audio files in the current product, using the XACT tool; it's just not easy to discover. XACT supports ADPCM compression on Windows and XMA compression on the Xbox 360. You can get about 4:1 compression with ADPCM and even better with XMA. So while perhaps not as high as some other encodings, such as WMA, it does offer quite a substantial savings ...".

Let's compress some audio files!

"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!