Read the post on Machaira's Space blog: "... Looks like Ben Nitschke's XNA book, Professional XNA Game Programming For Xbox 360 and Windows, is doing pretty well. I got a call from Chris Webb at Wrox (since I was the tech editor on the book) letting me know that it's in the top 600 of all books on Amazon.com (it's at 520 at the time I'm writing this) and in the top 20 of Computer books (16 at this time). Looking at the computer related books ahead of it and considering where it's at having only been available for a couple of weeks, I have a feeling it's going to move quickly up that chart ...".
Congrats, man!Tuesday, May 01, 2007
VISUAL3D.NET BETA1 IS OUT
RightRiot has announced on Realmware's forums that the first open beta for Visual3D.Net framework has been released.
Finally!
MCCODER'S "LITTLE COLLISION MANAGER"
MCCoder has published the source code for his "Stand alone little collision manager".
From the post: "... I had previously been doing all my collision stuff during my physics steps, which led to pretty fantasic failure cases. I was checking to make sure the objects were heading in the same direction before I’d say there was a collision, but this often led to objects coming to a rest while penetrating another object (say two objects interpenetrated and bounced off each other, but not with enough force to actually seperate them) ...".
Read on.RICK HOSKINSON'S LAMPGAME UPDATE
Rick has posted an update of his "LampGame".
TECH SAMMURAI'S POST-PROCESSING SYSTEM PREVIEW
Tech Sammurai has published a preview of the source code of his post-procesing system.
From the post: "... Anyway, since I’m starting the development process over, I can’t just upload the entire engine for you all to try. Again, I’m really sorry. However, the PostProcessor will stay pretty much the same in terms of how it is called, so I decided to show you just how easy it will be to add Post Processing to your game ...".
Watch this space!BORTREIST'S GUI
Bortreist has started blogging on the progress on his GUI system, called "SimpleGUI".
From the posts: "... Below is a shot of a SimpleGUI Window hosting a SimpleGrid control and four ButtonLegendLabels (I need to come up with a new name for that one) ...".
JONAS FOLLES' FIRST XNA GAME: "XPONG"
Jonas Folles is sharing his first game created with the XNA Framework to the community.
From Jonas' post: "... So as I mentioned in the beginning I just completed my implementation of PONG written using the XNA framework. I wanted my PONG game to be more "complete" than some of the XNA PONG samples available online. There are some nice tutorials you might check out. One of them is a video tutorial over at LearnXNA that walks you through an implementation of Pong. Two other implementations worth checking out are Rob Loachs' XNA Pong and Tiny Tennis up on Coding4Fun ...".
Welcome, Jonas!"SINGLETONS"
There's a new post at XNAtutorial which brings some light on the Farseer singleton.
From the post: "... In other words: When starting the game, the static Farseer is not created. If a piece of code tries to access the Physics property, then the static part of Farseer is created. Or, if someone tries to instantiate Farseer, it is not instantiated, but the static part is activated ...".
More after the break!FRUSTRUM CULLING IN XNA
Inverse has posted an article at Ziggyware showing how to cull objects relative to a camera's frustrum.
From the article: "... To cull an object, you have to compute the object's bounding volume. Since we are keeping this article simple we will use bounding spheres. Bounding spheres are both economical and very fast.
Iterating thru the meshes in a model, we can merge the bounding spheres to produce a composite that bounds the entire model ...".
Monday, April 30, 2007
VISUAL3D.NET BETA 1 EVALUATION GUIDELINES
Realmware Corp. has recently released the "Guidelines for Evaluating Visual3D.NET Beta 1".
From the guidelines: "... In order to make your evaluation a positive experience that helps us better Visual3D.NET and ensures you have the information you need work through crucial issues we ask you to adhere to the following guidlines during your evaluation of Visual3D.NET ...".
If you are a betatester, you should have already read them or be reading them right now."EXTENDING THE BITMAP FONT MAKER UTILITY"
There's an interesting article available at Ziggyware -"Extending the Bitmap Font Maker Utility", which explains how to add more image extensions to the tool recently released by the XNA Team for the creation of bitmap fonts.
From Ziggy's article: "... Extending the Bitmap Font Maker Utility to support multiple file formats is a very easy task since the .NET System.Drawing.Bitmap class wich the font utility uses to write its output with already supports several file formats via the System.Drawing.Image base class ... I have chosen to implement bmp, jpg, png and tiff ...".
Read on!CODING4FUN: INTRO TO XNA PART 3
Andy -TheZMan- has published the third part of his "Introduction to XNA" series, this time focusing on audio effects plus text rendering.
From the article: "... Before you go any further I need to explain how XNA works on the Xbox 360. Microsoft created a version of the .Net compact framework that runs on the Xbox 360, as well as Xbox versions of the XNA assemblies. To get these assemblies onto your Xbox 360 and enable deployment of XNA framework requires that you join the Creators Club which has a cost associated. The changes you will make for this article will work on the PC too, but you will not be able to play on the Xbox 360 without this. Microsoft have provided a video to help you get this installed: Getting Started with the XNA Creators Club ...".
This article is available on the Coding4Fun site.ADVENTURES IN PERFORMANCE
NekoCake analyzes how to measure the performance of your game by using FPS ratio and frame time.
From the article: "... I’ll look at what FPS values actually mean, how we count them in game and then why it’s a bad idea to profile your games performance using FPS as your only metric ...".
It uses the new SpriteFont class to render the performance data on screen.Saturday, April 28, 2007
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!Friday, April 27, 2007
"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!XNA FRAMEWORK FEATURE QUESTION: AUDIO
How important is to you being able to dynamically load ".wav" files into wavebanks with XNA? This is what Mitch is asking. Why? Go on reading ...
From Mitch's post: "... The native XACT APIs have added the support for programmatic wave playback. I.e. at runtime, you can load *.wav files into a Wavebank and play them from there, without needing to create a project and compile the binaries. This is something we're looking at supporting in our next release, but I want to gauge how much interest there is in this feature? Keep in mind that implementing this feature may very well mean we can't do some other feature ...".
So how important is this to you? Hurry up and post your answer here.TIP: AUTOFORMATTING MULTIPLE LINES OF TEXT
Rhysingsun has posted a code snippet for autoformatting multiple lines of text when using the new XNA's fonts system.
From the post: "... I've been putting off my GUI because I didn't want to redesign once the XNA team's font support came out, here's the first trick I created, to help myself with my GUI: autoformatting multiple lines of text. If you look into the documentation it says that the new text functionality will go the a new line with the text if the '\n' character is found. However, this makes for some static game design. What if I want the text block to be wider? ...".
Watch this space!ALL SAY HELLO TO "SPRITEFONT" ...
By this time, we're all aware that with the just-released update for the XNA Framework a lot of goodies were given away, like a built-in implementation to handle fonts rendering.
Shawn tell us what the font system is capable of for bitmap fonts, plus unveils a handy tool that helps you create a bitmap-font base which you can then enhace with your favorite graphic tool, like Photoshop, Gimp and such.
From the post: "... TrueType fonts are convenient, but you may sometimes find yourself wanting a more distinctive look for your text. You can create custom typefaces by arranging a set of character images into a single bitmap, separating the areas between each letter with a pure magenta marker color ...".
Read on!2007 INTEL® GAME DEMO CONTEST
Do you believe in second chances? What could you do if your game didn't make it in the Dream.Build.Play contest? Maybe (1) you decide to hold to your more-than-8-hour daytime job -plus you quit your dreams of cash, more cash and glory- or (2) the "Intel® Game Demo Contest 2007" could be your next solution.
However, you'll have to consider that the contest calls for entries elegible for the following two categories:
- Best Threaded Game: for the demo that best shows off the computational power of a multi-core processor, and
- Best Game on the Go: for the demo that best shows advances in laptop gaming.
Life is not that easy, isn't it? Well, before say "naaahh, it's not for me ...", check the prizes and the official rules.
From the rules: "... Contest begins March 5th, 2007. Registration Forms must be received by July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Community judging to determine finalists will begin July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007 and run until August 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Executables of finalists must be received by August 15th, 3:00pm PST 2007. Winners will be announced at Austin Game Developer Conference on September 5th, 2007, and published on the contest website the same day ...".
Let's code!
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