I must admit that I'm a bit upset right now, so I need to take off my "black suit", rest a little, clear my thoughts and then I promise you I'll publish a my review of the movie.
Bye.
[Btw, I know the black suit "disables" Peter's spider-sense, so tomorrow I'll explain the reason behind the title of this post ...]Thus, the need for hiring shader artists and or become one yourself -so as to create custom-made effects for your particular game or engine- just grows.
So, what to do? You can either do a google search -say, looking for free fx resources- buy some books that come packed with shader content -like the "ShaderX" series, hire a shader artist, and or build your own shaders by yourself from scratch or by modifying a pre-existing template (like the ones that come packed with the nVidia SDK 9.x/10).
Well, there's a new additional solution: "Shaders for Games" ... a site that should have been called "Shaders For Sale", instead ... check it out since these guys offer interesting HLSL shader packs at affordable prices.
The SM3 water fx screenshot looks great ...From the post: "... So far, ive completely rebuilt the screen system. Ive looked through Microsoft’s game state management sample and i loved the way they implemented some things (especially the transitions!). After playing with it a bit, it was clear id have to do a bit of retooling on my screen system, which ended up with me ripping out the whole screen system and starting from scratch ...".
From the post: "... Thrust, unlike Xna5D, has recieved its own project folder for 360 compatible work and I am happy to report that the new input core is running on both Windows and the 360. So how does this new Input services work? I have decided to go much the same route as the new GUIManager by templating the main class, Ebi. When you create a new Ebi (Event Based Input) object, you pass along the type of an object that inherits from ControllerBase. This allows the Ebi object to instance your controller's code and use it ...".
Nice!From the article: "... With some of the projects that I am working I am going to have to be able to store player and game data, so with this in mind I thought that it was time I had a look at the storage systems that are included in the XNA Framework. The first stage in this project was to make sure that I had had a good read of the Documentation files for the Storage System that Shipped with the XNA Framework ...".
Read on!From John's post: "... It is 05/06/07, and today is the day we, "The Gib Factory", are releasing a Beta to our first game, Tower Defense. A lot of progress was made over the past week and even in the last couple of hours. Sounds have made their way into the game as well as particle effects for towers and the GUI is becoming more and more complete everyday. We are looking forward to hearing back from everyone about this version, what works and what doesn't as well as any bugs you may find ...".
Downloading it right now ...Watch this space!
From Kyle's article: "... Imagine a game like Pong, except with a rotating triangular ball. This ball needs to have perfect collision detection with the paddles, which means if any part of the triangle intersects with the paddle, there is a collision. You can’t just do simple radial collision detection, nor can you do rectangle collision detection, because the triangle might not actually be colliding for some collisions detected in those cases. However, performing the triangle-to-paddle collision detection can be expensive to do every frame (I know, not that expensive – but imagine 200 balls with 30 players around a big field with balls also colliding with each other, or something like that). So what are you to do? ...".
Read on!However, and despite the fact that I haven't gone the cinema yet to watch the above-mentioned movie, I'm particularly more excited with the Fantastic Four's sequel. Why? First, if the Silver Surfer is in it, it should also imply that "Gah Lak Tus" is. And second, because of this new trailer.
I'm not going to argue why I prefer more FF over SP series of movies, at least for now, but in short, I'm not happy with the way Peter Parker's life is being presented/plotted. Maybe in a later post I could explain the reasons behind my sentiment, but for now, I'd only say the the part of the script that deals with PP should be improved.
Anyway, the new FF trailer rocks!
[Btw, an ironman movie is coming ...]From the message: "... Yesterday I received updated code from Ben for Professional XNA Game Programming, and it is now live on the book’s page at wrox.com. This new code replaces all of the code previously available on the book’s download site, so all readers should update as soon as possible.
The update includes bug fixes, all samples now compile on both XNA Versions and on Windows (XP and Vista) and Xbox 360. In addition, Ben also included new support for some older ATI video cards because he’s cool like that ...".
What are you waiting for? Just go and download the updated files!From the post: "... What We're Looking For:We are looking for experienced Engineers, Web Developers, Marketers, and QA Specialists ...".
Hurry up!Maybe we can find the answer to this question in this video.
Intresting ...From the OXM's article: "... MGS Europe will be headed up by Phil Spencer, general manager, Microsoft Game Studios, who will report to Shane Kim, Microsoft Game Studios' corporate vice president ..."
Cheers!From the announcement: "... Yesterday I wanted to put all the samples from the book on my blog, but it is already way to overloaded here with screenshots and games, adding another 10 games will not make anything better. Instead I had a crazy idea to create a XNA Community site in one day. It is called XnaProjects.Net. The idea is for everyone to submit their games and links. News are grabbed with Google Blog Search and more features will come in July 2007 when I got more than 5 minutes time in a row ...".
Cool!The issue includes an exclusive interview to Robin Burrowes -Microsoft's Xbox Live product manager for the UK and Ireland, plus previews of "Mass Effect" and "Shadowrun", a review of "Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars", and more, much more.
From the post: "... Whenever you are dealing with transitions that take some fixed amount of time to complete, it can be useful to normalize their position along this timeline into a control value in the range 0 to 1. This makes the transition state easier to manipulate ... More importantly, you can apply curves to make the animation speed up or slow down in interesting ways. Normalized control values are useful for this because it is easy to apply curves that will affect their shape without changing the overall range of the motion ...".
Read on!From Eli's post: "... I don't know about everyone else, but usually the first thing I do after loading models is loop over their effects and set up their lighting. (Check Shawn's blog to read more about the standard lighting rig and per pixel lighting. ) The other day I thought of a neat way to tuck this code away a little, so I thought I'd share.
A subclass of ContentManager could easily handle the model setup code for us automatically. It could check what kind of content it's being asked to load, and if the content type is a Model, it can set up the model automatically ...".
Read on!From the tutorial: "... The render routine will draw the scene to a RenderTarget2D, then draw the render target to backbuffer normally, then draw the render target to backbuffer again with the shockwave shader ...".
From the tutorial: "... Just about every beginners tutorial for XNA starts off with the same things, making a sprite move along the screen. I'm going to show you how to do the same thing, but over a curved line, more specifically over a Bezier Curve. Curvy behaviour its a pretty neat thing to do for some games. You could set up a Physics engine to solve all movement in you game (a relatively complex thing to do) but for some games this would be unnecessary. For example, if your making a side scrolling shooter with aeroplanes you could very easily make your missiles drop from your aircraft, curve backwards a bit and then speed forward ...".
